It's the same old thing in 2018...

I didn't think I was ready for a remake of Cranberries' Zombie, but Bad Wolves really nailed it. As I was listening to it yesterday with an ache in my heart thinking of how relevant it still is today... I was thinking back to how the Bosnian War was happening when I was first listening to that Cranberries cd back in 1994. 



Back in 1994, I was living in Germany, and, by 1995, my original neighbors had moved out, and my apartment was then downstairs from a refugee family from Bosnia. That experience shaped so much of my world view... a little girl and her younger brother so timid the first time I met them were, in the weeks and months to come, running to my car when they would see me pull up, excited to tell me all of their new English words they'd learned at their new school. Little Salma was yelling out "one, two, three, four, five!!!" before I even pulled into the driveway. Smiling faces asking me sheepishly, "Eis, bitte?" They had already learned that I kept icy pops in my freezer for them... but only once their mom and dad approved. This family, through their limited understanding of German and English, and my broken German, shared dinners of various types of sausages with me, over time opening up to me about seeing their family members murdered and losing everyone and everything before being brought to this apartment in Gochsheim, Germany. They wore so many emotions in their eyes, on their faces and their postures... exhaustion, hope, relief, fear, ambition, trauma, excitement, strain... so many more things that not I nor anyone who has not lived their experience can even identify. I think about that sweet family all the time... it's been over 20 years, and I still see their eyes, the smiles that eventually spread wider across their faces as they found their new place and some sense of security and safety for their family knowing that everything - despite their emotional wounds and losses - just might be ok... at least for their precious children, the resilience of whom continues to inspire me today. Those two beautiful kids who would come pet my cats and anticipate the "eis" I would get from my freezer.

Look, I share some of my emotions about topics of refugees and about caring about people experiencing things we are so fortunate not to have to experience. I talk about how important it is that we help where we can and not turn a blind eye. Something that gets under my skin is people who talk all day about living in Jesus's image and then find some sort of biblical justification for doing the exact opposite of Jesus's teachings and example, turning the word "refugee" into something it doesn't mean... shadowing it with undertones of somehow bad, sneaky people who want to do us harm and take all of our money and resources without anything in return. It hurts my heart. 

This experience with my neighbors in Germany is what inspired our volunteering with IRC when we moved to Dallas. I felt I could finally do something to tangibly help someone who just wanted a chance for their family to live. This cause is so near and dear to my heart. What I can say is this...

My opinions are not out of naivety and not out of a liberal bleeding heart or whatever someone wants to call it. It is out of legitimate experience, out of stepping out of my protective walls of being a really lucky American and allowing myself to feel the pain of others and see myself in them, see them the way they could be in my shoes... shoes that walked in their own painful path but which seems like a dream to someone who had to flee everything they knew just to survive. A lot of the way I approach life is just who I always was going to be, some I'm sure I owe to the inspirational words I listed to from Pastor Bill Rudd at my church growing up about how to love people, so much is from my own life experiences, living in a lot of different kinds of places, befriending many different sorts of people, reading so much, and opening myself up to others' experiences who differed from my own. I have learned and evolved, and so often I wish I could go back to those dinners with my Bosnian neighbors knowing what I know now and see it through my more experienced eyes, knowing I still wouldn't know the half of it.

So I'm driving along listening to Bad Wolves' version of Zombie and realize they replaced the lyrics "it's the same old thing since 1916" with "it's the same old thing in 2018". Yes, exactly. The Syrian refugees that some in our country want to reject came to mind. And in my heart and mind I'm back at the table with my Bosnian neighbors not knowing how to explain something like this. My heart just aches for the indifference and for the families that could have been sitting across from a new friend in a new country last year, safe from what was trying to murder their family, feeling hope for the future. Those people are dead.

But there will be others. There are others. And all of their lives matter. And we as Americans have a chance to do the right thing now as we will again and again. 

Will we, though?

#RefugeesOfWar #LoveThyNeighbor #BlessedBeTheWeary #Cranberries #BadWolves #Zombie

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