The Flag Ceremony at the Refugee Center

Every December, the International Rescue Committee office in Salt Lake City holds a year-end gathering for the families they have resettled. Staff members hang small flags from the ceiling — one for every nation represented that year. In 2023, there were flags from forty-seven countries: Afghanistan, Ukraine, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Myanmar, Syria, Colombia, Eritrea. Families who had never shared a meal together crowded into a community room, wearing their finest clothes, holding plates of food from their homelands.

A caseworker named Maria Gonzalez once described the moment when the room falls quiet and someone begins to pray. "You hear 'amen' in a dozen accents," she said. "And you realize — every person in this room walked through something that should have destroyed them. But here they are."

That is the vision John saw on Patmos. Not a tidy congregation of people who looked alike and spoke the same language, but a vast, uncountable multitude from every nation, tribe, people, and tongue — all standing together before the throne of the Lamb. Their robes were white, not because they had avoided suffering, but because they had come through it. The great tribulation had not kept them out. It had been the road they traveled to get in.

The Almighty does not seal His people to spare them from the journey. He seals them so that the journey cannot steal what matters most — their place in that room, before that throne, wearing those robes washed clean by the Lamb.