Morning Meditation: Immigration and Welcome - Story

I sat on the porch of a Mennonite church in McAllen, Texas, three miles from the border, watching a grandmother named Rosa braid her granddaughter's hair. They had walked for eleven days. Rosa's shoes had worn through somewhere in Tamaulipas, and a stranger had given her his sandals — a man who had nothing but those sandals and a water jug. She told me this while her fingers worked steadily through the girl's dark hair, as if braiding were a kind of prayer.

Luke 4:18-19 was not written for quiet mornings. When Jesus stood in the Nazareth synagogue and declared that the Spirit of the Lord had anointed Him to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives, to restore sight to the blind, to set the oppressed free — He was reading His own mission statement out loud, in front of people who would try to throw Him off a cliff for it. The Jubilee He announced was not a metaphor. It was a rearrangement of the world.

The Anabaptist tradition has always understood this. Our spiritual ancestors did not merely believe in Jesus — they followed Him into dangerous places. They shared bread with strangers when sharing bread was illegal. They opened doors that the empire wanted shut.

Rosa finished the braid and tied it with a strip of fabric torn from her own sleeve. She looked up and said, simply, "God walked with us."