Originally published in the Deseret News.
“Pull up a seat, you’re welcome at the table, there’s room and abundance for all.” — Peggy Noonan
Sometimes I feel like we live in a darkening world. Light is all around us, but each day the flame dims as disheartening events turn us away from the light — bombings in Paris and Brussels, the sorry state of American presidential politics and the need for fetal pain abortion laws. There are a lot of hard things to process every day. We live in challenging times.
This week the light in the world got a little brighter because of renewed efforts to serve the world’s refugee population. The source of that light came from Utah. The world is a brighter place today.
The “I was a stranger” effort, launched by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, builds upon a long history of sisterly love in Utah. It’s a history served as well by Catholic Community Services and other faith-based, governmental and nonprofit entities. In Utah, we welcome the world. As one female leader with the LDS Church put it, “This is not a program; it is who we are.”
This welcome mat caught the attention of the Wall Street Journal. In an article titled, “With welcoming stance, conservative Utah charts its own course with refugees,” the nation’s largest newspaper reported on Utah’s commitment to extending and deepening our affinity for refugees.
This affection extends beyond the faith community. Shortly after the Paris terrorist attacks, Gov. Gary Herbert became the only one of 27 Republican governors to express a willingness to accommodate Syrian refugees. This move prompted political cartoonist Pat Bagley to draw a Pulitzer Prize-worthy sketch of a Syrian boy who, as a refugee, washed ashore on a Turkish beach. In the sketch, Bagley shows Herbert helping the boy while the other Republican governors walk away. The caption reads, “C’mon, Gary. Not our problem.” Meanwhile a 3-year-old boy in a red shirt and blue shorts has washed up to shore, face down in the water.
Of course, refugee resettlement is our problem, both as an economic and political imperative and as brothers and sisters in the human family.
Approximately 60,000 refugees from more than 20 countries live in Utah. An estimated 1,100 new refugees arrive in the Beehive State each year. Many have been kidnapped, beaten, and tortured in their homelands. Almost all have been humiliated or degraded in some way. Most are women and children. They are strangers in need of friends.
While I don’t subscribe to civil rights activist Cesar Chavez’s politics, he did eloquently represent the need for people to love and serve one another in friendship. He said:
We should always walk like one family.
We are all in the same cause and need.
Together we make up the same future.
Alone we are not worth anything.
Together, we have great value.
The “I was a stranger” effort reminds us that we have great value in serving one another. Indeed, we have a moral responsibility to engage in a personal ministry of sorts to befriend people in need. We must share our abundance with others. When we lift a person in need, we turn a stranger into a friend, and we bring more light into their lives, and into our own as well.
While some use the term melting pot to describe America, I prefer the metaphor suggested by Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, of a warm and tasty Sunday stew. She calls immigration (and by extension refugee resettlement) a Sunday stew that is “rich, various and roiling, and all of it held together by a strong broth.”
I believe that strong broth is our familial connection of love, charity, and compassion. In an ever darkening world, I welcome the light refugees bring into our country and state. I believe I speak for most Americans and Utahns when I say, “You are welcome here. Come and break bread with us.”