Give Well. Receive Well.

It's hard to help people. Sometimes helping people makes them feel minimized and pokes hard at their pride. Sometimes the helper does not know how to help well and increases the discomfort of the receiver of their good intentions. Sometimes those good intentions are completely and solidly founded in selfishness and ego appeasement. "It feels good to give to those who are less fortunate than I." Pat, pat, pat on the back, good deed done for the day, the week, the month, the year. We feel guilty, so we give. We feel coerced, so we give. We feel heart broken, so we give. We feel. We give.

We give money. We give time. We give food. We give clothes. I work with refugees and refugees are the recipients of a lot of giving. For some, it is a stinging reality to embrace. Several of Welcome Home's residents have left positions of prestige and professional careers to start a life dependant on food banks and Ontario Works. It's a hard pill to swallow and the interactions that they have with Canadians can make the going down easy or cause a gag reflex. A politician at a recent fundraising event, The Ride for Refuge, was boasting about how Canada receives so many refugees from various countries, to which one WH resident reponded, "I hate that. Why do white people do that? What about all the Germans and other people who came here after the war? Why do they only talk about people from South America or Africa as refugees?" In contrast, a little while later, another WH resident commented, "I love your country more and more all the time. Look at this, all these people gathered together, to bike in bad weather for others. This would never happen in my country." Two people from similar situations reacted in starkly different ways to the giving of time and money on their behalf.

Johnathan Edwards penned those famous words reminding us that we are all sinners in the hands of angry God; a harsh but true sentiment. We are all recipients of grace and although our hands were not made to be idle, neither were they made to be tight-fisted. They were made to be generous and to accept generosity. Time and time again, by way of the WH residents and others, I am reminded that we are all refugees. For many Canadians, their ancestors have come from afar but moreso, every person is alienated and separated from God, in need of refuge found only in Jesus. The borders and citizenship lines that are made and the maps that are drawn are insignificant to the Maker of all things. Disregarding them. we look forward to the day when these frontiers will be shaken and replaced with a kingdom that can not be shaken, a city whose architect and builder is God. Followers of Jesus should shake those frontiers now and start building the city today. With regard to giving and receiving, let's learn to do both and to do both well, not imagining that we are either a giver or a receiver, but that we are the two things at all times.