I was a stranger...

(If you make no claim to be a Jesus Follower, feel free to ignore what follows)

This weekend I heard something that drove me crazy. Friends of ours were in Central Asia in the 90s doing Community Development. Friends of theirs are in a Scandinavian country working with a Christian Organization that does "religious" things as well as "relief" things, oriented toward mobilizing younger folks sort of for "gap year" kinds of things. And they attract significant numbers of youth from North America.

Like most of their country, they are welcoming Middle Eastern refugees, to the point that there's a national shortage of lightly used mattresses to provide to the new arrivals. They're doing this in a way that's fully integrated with everything else that they're doing. Someone pointed out that there were very different views of refugees on this side of the Atlantic, so they felt the need to inform the kids' parents what they were doing to placate fears, which they did.

On reading this, something inside me snapped. This need for placation gets our continent a huge "Come on, man!" award.

I'm done with being "nice" about this. You who claim to follow Jesus, as I claim, consider this: Referring to the N.T. story of the Sheep and the Goats in Matthew, to whom, to the sheep or the goats, would Jesus have said:

"I was a stranger and you locked me out of your country because you were afraid I was a terrorist or a Shari`a zealot."

Come on, man...