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Each year I am tasked with giving an annual report to other churches on our district. It's a way to be accountable, and have others join in the struggle and joy of what is happening in all of our churches. This year we were asked to share a way we have personally been engaged in an act of compassion this year. This is my story.
Each year I give a “state of the Church address”, where I seek to cast vision for our church in the upcoming year. This year, the focus was hospitality. I told my congregation “they will know they are Christians by our love, but they will know they are loved by our hospitality.”
This has been something Mac, Michael, and I have tried to live out in our lives. It’s a cornerstone of what we believe it means to be a Christian. Because of this, over the last 5 years, we have seen our home filled with no less than 200 people. People staying overnight, using our showers, eating meals in our home. Calls and emails from other Nazarenes who don’t know us but need a place to stay while they do doctoral work, or do work in the city. Mac and I decided when we got married that our home has an open door policy to those in need. Our house is not our own, it belongs to God, and we will use it however God wants to use it. Our answer has always been “yes, come.”
So, when we received an email from The Welcome Network, a faith based non-profit doing immigration and refugee work here in Northwest Indiana, that they were desperately looking for housing for Congolese asylum seekers and refugees, we didn’t need to think or pray long to know that our answer needed to be “yes, come.”
We knew the moment we said yes, the process could be fast. We didn’t know how fast it would be. We gave our yes on a Friday in November, just a couple weeks before thanksgiving, and received the call on Sunday. A family of 7, just released from the screening process at the border needed somewhere to go.
“We know this is a lot of people. We know this is more than you expected, let us know, but know when you say yes, the organization in Texas will put them on a bus and they will be here in days.”
I asked Mac “what do we do? There are 7 people. 5 children from age 2 to 13. Can we house them?” Mac’s response “We aren’t going to leave them with nowhere to go. Tell them yes, come.”
So again, we said yes that Sunday, and they arrived the next Wednesday. I had a trip out of town, so Mac and his family moved all of our furniture. They moved the baby's crib back into our bedroom. They made beds. We asked for more towels, sheets, and plates. Our church stepped in in amazing ways. We brought the folding table up from downstairs, and literally turned our table for 6 into a table for 10.
When they arrived in our home, no one spoke English. Mac used every word in French that he could remember. If you doubt that God uses everything when given to him, ask Mac about his once seemingly useless minor in French. When I realized the kids had learned Spanish from their 8 month journey through the jungles of south and Central America, I used every bit of Spanish I knew to communicate with them.
Adding 7 people to your once quiet home was, in one word, chaos. It’s been hours of school pick ups and drop offs. I’ve spent hours on the phone with school counselors trying to come up with plans of how to help our 8th grader make friends in a world that is difficult for American kids who speak English fluently. We spent Thanksgiving in the church basement, because we outgrew both our home, and my in-law’s home, where we introduced them to “the feast of the turkey” as they call it. We spent the most beautiful Christmas we’ve ever had, with children coming down the stairs with wide eyes that a Santa Claus that never visited them in Africa would come here to their new home in America for them. With tiny wrapped gifts under the tree with tags that read “Michael Big”, “Robbie”, and “baby Michael”, small tokens chosen with care from the school store. We’ve introduced them to birthday cake, a tradition that is not common in the Congo. The kids now assure me that birthday cake is their favorite food, to which I wholeheartedly agree.
But they’ve introduced us to a lot too. Maybe the biggest being constant sanctification. That might sound weird, but living in community with people is hard work. Things get broken. Misunderstandings happen. There are many days we just want to have a quiet house, and we don’t have that luxury. Groceries for 10 people are extremely expensive, and we’ve learned to give without thinking. We’ve learned that the right and good thing to do, is often the hardest thing to do.
It was easy to initially say yes, it’s much harder to keep saying yes.
Maybe the biggest lesson of compassion we have learned involves our son. After our initial yes, I was sitting in his nearly empty room while he played with his toys, and started to cry. Was this what is best for him? Getting displaced from his room? Having to share all his toys? Introducing him to unknown people from an unknown place? This great sense of mom guilt rushed over me. I knew we wouldn’t have as much to spend on him. We already had so little, and now we were asking for loaves and fish miracles daily. He would go without things I always imagined him having.
After 6 months, it’s safe to say, he’s by far the favorite person in our home. He says so many of the kids names, and when our 8th grader gets home from school he screams, giggles, and runs to her. I have to remind myself daily as a parent, that when I baptized my son into the church, I was saying he wasn’t mine, but belonged to God. That of all the things in the world I want for him, safety is so far down the list. What I pray and want for him is to be a person of love, of compassion, of holiness. I know the only way for him to learn those things, is to live those things.
So we lean into the hard things. We lean into the hard days. We lean into empty bank accounts, and broken garbage disposals. We lean into misunderstandings, and language barriers, we lean into them like leaning into childbirth, and what we’ve found is a joy that’s unspeakable, a love that is unending, a community that is deeper than race, culture, or language.
I asked our 14 year old one time. Is there a song you could teach us that you used to sing in church at home in Africa? She thought for a moment and she said “I know one….” And she sang “Alleluia…. Alleluia...for the Lord God Almighty reigns” And as she sang in Portuguese, I sang in English. I was reminded, Alleluia isn’t English, and so we had this word that transcended language, and it means Praise God! Praise God!
In church a couple months ago, we sang a chorus you might be familiar with “Alleluia. Alleluia. Alleluia. Alleluia.” We had at least 3 main languages represented in that sanctuary that Sunday morning, and every voice was singing. Haitian creole, Lingala, Portuguese, Spanish, English, French, it didn’t matter, in A Capella voices rang. “Alleluia! Alleluia!” This is the truth we have learned these past few months.
I asked Mac “how is it that these people can drive me crazy, and yet I can love them so deeply?” He said “I think they just call that family.”
And it is. Through compassion, through grace, through hospitality, we have learned a great deal about the beauty, the wealth, the glory, the love, joy, and the grace of the family of God. Alleluia.
-In the Great Hospitality of Christ, respectfully submitted, Rev. Robbie Cansler
