Colossians 3:12
Firstly, I’d like to apologise. This first blog entry of mine in our new CVM Torbay blog, is not anywhere near the same ballpark as the one I was going to write. There’s no laughs, no funny anecdotes & it’s quite hard hitting. Although I’m told I tend to end up down the ‘hard hitting’ path when I get worked up a bit.
You see, I was pondering on the content, shortly after writing the title, when the headline screamed out at me from the news channel on TV.
‘71 dead migrants found in abandoned lorry’
My shock at this was then followed by head shaking despair, as the next headline immediately after declared,
‘200 dead after boat capsizes off Libyan coast’
It was at that point I deleted the first few lines I had written so far, to start over again.
Much is written about the conditions that people must endure in their home countries, whether it’s either persecution on religious or social grounds, economic struggle, poverty or simply a desperate search for a happier life, for them to want to climb into a lorry or a boat, filled to the brim with hope, along with many others, in an attempt to escape the world they live in for a newer, better version. And in some cases, I use the term ‘boat’ loosely! Craft or vessel would probably be more accurate.
In many cases, there are multiple family members, brothers & sisters, uncles & aunts, sons & daughters, who without realising are leaving one type of danger behind, only to exchange it for another type.
Make no mistake; some will never make it to the land of ‘hope’ or to a new life of ‘freedom’. Many might physically find themselves in another country, but will in turn have without knowing, done themselves quite a bad deal, one that will have cost many up to £6000 a person. Some will be sold as factory workers, some as sex workers. Some will even end up in detention centres, where they will await their fate, hope hanging by a thread as the chances of being sent straight back to the nightmare, to relive it all again are likely.
But that is just the ones who make it.
During the first 8 months of 2014, more than 2500 people have died or are missing feared dead after trying to get into Europe across the Mediterranean. That number has increased this year. And, for those who make it, the reality of trying to build a new life in Europe can be soul destroying.
Huddling in groups, at railway stations, with only the clothes they came with. Hiding out in the countryside’s on the edge of cities or sleeping rough in the harshest ghettoes in the already swelling populations of Europe’s finest metropolis. Everything will turn full circle & they will go ‘home’ defeated.
But before any of this, they have to face an already seemingly lost fight.
The word used to describe them is usually ‘migrant’. A word that has seemingly become increasingly toxic, one that has frightened us by conjuring images of a ‘swarm’ as described by political leadership, ‘congregating at our borders, about to destroy our very way of life’.
“Words that convey an exaggerated sense of threat can fuel anti-immigration sentiment and a climate of intolerance and xenophobia.”
– Prof Alexander Betts, Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford University
The compassion seems sadly non-existent. It has become a situation where the thousands of people who drown each year when a boat sinks in the Mediterranean are no longer people nor are they refugees. The same seems to be said of the 71 people who died in a lorry found near Hungary & the 200 found dead off the coast of Libya. They are migrants.
It is a word that now strips people of their humanity, helping turn our eyes away from the fact that they are actually people. The Greek & Hebrew words for compassion when translated mean ‘to have mercy, to feel sympathy and to have pity’.
It is my firm belief that the enemy of man is in full view everywhere we look in this situation, breeding the very opposite of mercy, sympathy & pity. But as Christians, we are taught from the very centre of everything, about compassion. The most compassionate guy we’re taught about is Jesus, from the very personal compassion he showed in his daily life with others, to his own teachings to us, where he drove into our very hearts the true concept, through instruction and example.
One good example was in Mark 5. He comes across a guy who had been possessed by demons. Now this was the sort of guy we might see if we look hard enough on every street in our towns today. Wandering in dirty clothes, shouting at people, cursing and with wounds on show from his rough living. He even lived in a graveyard, which seems all too familiar.
After a bit of a row with the spirits, Jesus had cleaned the guy’s soul & rid him of these demons.
Now obviously the guy was quite happy about this, as I’m sure the locals were too! He wanted to follow Jesus where ever he was going straight away.
But Jesus gave him a job, ‘Go home to your family & tell them how much the Lord has done for you and how good he has been to you’. Jesus showed mercy on him. Again, in Mark 3, we find Jesus entering the synagogue on the Sabbath, where he comes across a man with a crippled hand. He knew full well the Pharisees were watching to see what he would do, so they had more evidence with which to plot against him. Jesus kind of called their bluff a bit & said out loud, so all would hear, “On the Sabbath should we do good deeds or evil deeds? Should we save someone’s life or destroy it?” Jesus was quite angry as he looked around at the silence & yet he even felt sorry for them all, for their stubbornness. He told the man to stretch out his bad hand and it was healed. Jesus stood up against those seemingly in charge, which let’s face it, was a pretty dangerous thing to do, but his compassion was in full view, for all to see.
As I finish, Budapest’s main train station has been closed, due the large amount of people trying to board trains, to try to find & make better lives for themselves, one of the more respected daily newspapers is now talking that the EU borders should be closed and the flow of refugees across the Mediterranean continues. In an attempt to shock the UK into action, the newspapers have shown a photo of a Policeman carrying a dead Syrian boy, who was washed ashore, off the beach near Bodrum, Turkey.
I hope those trying to escape from, for example, Hungary, Syria, Eritrea & Libya find compassion from somewhere.
May all our eyes be touched as well.
CVM TORBAY 