First Week of Advent: Hope

The hope of Advent is the poignant memory that Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior came into the world as a vulnerable, poor and homeless child. His parents, Mary and Joseph, were refugees at least twice. Before Jesus was born, they were forced to leave Nazareth and travel to Bethlehem by decree of the Roman Emperor.  After Jesus’ birth, they were forced to flee Bethlehem for Egypt due to King Herod’s murderous intentions.

During Advent, we remember and celebrate the hope of Mary and Joseph and their trust in God to bless and keep their little baby safe. Unfortunately, we are reminded daily that there are still empires and rulers in the world whose unjust decrees force families to flee for their lives. Christians, especially, are called to care deeply for these refugees, to recognize in them the holy family in today’s world.  We are to be a safe harbor, a place of respite, knowing that as we assist and provide for today’s refugees, we are serving our Lord.  We must keep the hope of Advent alive by shining the Light of Christ into the darkness. Advent is not only a time for remembering and celebrating, but it is also an invitation to participate in the contemporary drama of the Nativity. What part will we play in welcoming the holy family into our communities, our homes and our hearts this year?

–Caren Teichmann 
  

Caren is a student at Vanderbilt University Divinity School currently interning with World Relief Nashville for the 2011-2012 academic year.

A Thanksgiving Prayer

As Thanksgiving grows near each year, the women of my family have a tradition of taking an annual trip together before the madness of December descends upon us.  This trip is for celebrating and strengthening our relationships as grandmother, mother, daughter,sister, aunt, cousin, and niece.  Because I have four sons and a husband in my immediate family, this time with my female relatives is especially necessary and important for me.  I am eternally grateful for each of these women and our time apart which always serves to renew and refresh my spirit. 

However, today I find the idea of leaving home is bittersweet. I am as excited as ever to go and be with my family but I am sad to be apart from my new friends at World Relief, even for a week.  It was with a heavy heart that I told my Burmese friends I would not be there on Tuesday to tutor English.  We had eleven most wonderful students on Friday for English class and it makes me so sad to have to miss this Friday. How it is that these people have become so near and dear to me in only a few months of interning at World Relief?

This morning for devotion I read a poem of thanksgiving by Howard Thurman, for "all the warmth of humankind that I have known." This poem helped me to understand the love I feel for my new friends and my sadness at being apart from them for the next few weeks.  It actually put my deeply felt appreciation to and for them in the context of family. And so this morning, hours before my family arrives and we begin our journey together, I offer this prayer of thanksgiving:

"We bring to mind all the warmth of humankind that we have known:
Our mothers' arms,
The strength of our fathers,
The playmates of our childhood...
The tears we have shed, the tears we have seen;
The excitement of laughter and the twinkle in the eye with its reminder that life
is good.
For all these we make an act of Thanksgiving this day."

Caren is a student at Vanderbilt University Divinity School currently interning with World Relief Nashville for the 2011-2012 academic year.

Empowered to Serve

After two months of interning at World Relief Nashville, I am learning what it means to empower the local Church to serve the most vulnerable. Last Tuesday as I drove to tutor my refugee friend, I couldn’t help but think about how much more confident I am now than I was six weeks ago. In the beginning, I didn’t know anything about how to teach English to a newly-arrived Burmese family. I didn’t have any experience working and building relationships with people so incredibly different from me in nationality, culture, customs and language. I hadn’t ever taught a job readiness class, or picked up a newly arrived family at the airport, or shopped at K and S World Market.

During these two months, I have had some stressful moments, to be sure. But whenever I find myself in over my head, I reach out to a World Relief staff member who patiently and gracefully pulls me back to safety. Someone is always available to hear my concerns, answer my questions, direct me to resources, offer suggestions and simply tell me, “Well done.”  Time and time again, I have been encouraged and affirmed in my ministry here.  I have been empowered by the confidence the staff has in my being able to do this work and do it well.

This is something of what I have come to recognize as Empowering the local Church to serve the most vulnerable, knowledge, compassion, support, resources, patience and grace. But the most important way that World Relief empowers is by its confidence that the Spirit of the Living God is present and active in history and has called the Church to participate in God’s reconciling and redemptive mission in the world by caring for and serving the most vulnerable.

Paul says, "It is the parts of the body which we consider least dignified, that we surround with the greatest dignity" (1 Corinthians 12:23). The most honored parts of the body are not the head or the hands, which lead and control.  The most important parts are the least respectable parts.  World Relief truly believes in the mystery of the church, that the people of God can actually embody the living Christ in the world.  When we surround the strangers among us, the most vulnerable, the alien, the orphan and the widow with great dignity, respect and love, then we place Christ at the true center of our worship.  This confidence is the spirit of being empowered to serve the most vulnerable. 

Caren is a student at Vanderbilt University Divinity School currently interning with World Relief Nashville for the 2011-2012 academic year.

The Need to Read...and Pray!

German theologian Karl Barth is credited with saying that Christians should read the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. In a 1963 interview with Time magazine during the cold war, Barth said, "News media is important. I always pray for the poor, the sick, journalists, authorities of the state and the church.  However, as a theologian, I should never be formed by the world around me - neither East nor West. I should make my vocation to show both East and West that we can live without a clash. Where the peace of God is proclaimed, peace on earth is implicit."

My work at World Relief Nashville has changed the way I read news media of today, internet and online news services.  As I meet people from Burma, Nepal, Eritrea, and Somalia, I am eager to learn about the countries from which they come. Recalling this quote of Barth's, I decided that each week of my internship, I will read and pray about the news of the UN refugee agency. Today there was a story about the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Somalia and how it has forced almost 320,000 Somalis to flee their country so far this year. While the majority of Somalis seek refuge in neighboring Kenya and Ethiopia, many Somalis head northwards to embark on a dangerous sea journey across the Gulf of Aden to Yemen. This year 20,000 Somalis have arrived in Yemen's reception centres bringing with them stories of drought, famine, war and slavery that caused them to flee Somalia.

And so I pray this news with this prayer,

O glorious and blessed God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, today I pray for Somalis who have been uprooted from their homes. I pray for all those who must flee for their lives, who leave their land and culture often to live apart from their families.  I mourn their losses of dignity, community, resources and employment. I especially ask that you be with the women and children who are the majority of those displaced. Please be with those women who have been assaulted and brutalized on their journey and those who have lost children to sickness and hunger.  I pray for the Somalis who even though they survive the journey to Kenya, Ethiopa, and Yemen, their lives are scarred by danger, war, exploitation, drought, famine and desperate poverty.  God of mercy and compassion, you promise to meet us on the way and abide with us always. Help World Relief to stand with the most vulnerable, our sisters and brothers who simply desire a chance to survive and prosper in their home countries.  When there is no such chance or when it is painfully slow in coming, help us inspire and guide your church to act with compassion, care and commitment so as to be the tent in which all your children can be restored to your loving presence and safe shelter.  Amen.

Caren is a student at Vanderbilt University Divinity School currently interning with World Relief Nashville for the 2011-2012 academic year.

Motivated by Love

I have heard it said that theology is worrying about what God is worrying about when God wakes up in the morning.  A simple question in Exodus always serves to remind me what God worries about: "This cloak of [your neighbor's] is the only covering he has for his body. What else has he to sleep in? If your neighbor cries out to me, I will hear  him; for I am compassionate.” (Exodus 22: 26-27)

As a Christian, I must be worried about my neighbors, where they will sleep, how they will cover themselves, and from where they will receive their daily bread and drink.  I am called to be compassionate as God is compassionate. To be compassionate means to “feel with” God and neighbor. As a Christian, I have been taught and believe that acceptance of God’s merciful love requires that I commit myself to others.  Acceptance of the gift of life from God motivates me to work for justice, peace, happiness and life for all God’s children. This was a major factor in my decision to intern this year at World Relief.  It is part of my personal commitment to others, to my neighbors, born out of the gracious gift of God’s love for the world.

In my work at World Relief teaching English, I find myself “feeling with” the English students what it must be like to come to a new country, learn a foreign language as an adult, be immersed in a strange culture, to weep for family members left behind, to worry about where they will sleep and what they will eat.  I have discovered that in this “feeling with” my neighbors, especially as it spills over into my prayer life, I am lead to a new and deeper encounter with God.  Being united to my neighbors in their joys and sufferings, in the challenges of a new life in a strange land creates anew in me a “thirst and hunger” for God.

I can also see now that it wasn’t only my theology--my way of believing and thinking about God--nor was it merely human compassion that empowered me to start and to hopefully one day complete this journey. All along the way God has been, is and will be with me and also with my neighbors, the newly-arrived individuals to this country. God is guiding all of us, leading us toward compassionate encounters with one another that in turn serve to lead us anew to God, the source and the summit of our journey.  Praise be to God.

Caren is a student at Vanderbilt University Divinity School currently interning with World Relief Nashville for the 2011-2012 academic year.

True Hospitality

“Great care and concern are to be shown in receiving poor people and pilgrims, because in them more particularly Christ is received.”

- Joan Chittister, The Rule of Benedict:  A Spirituality for the 21^st Century

Hospitality is one of the highest forms of devotion.  Receiving poor people and pilgrims with great care and concern is an essential part of Christian worship.  As such, hospitality must be total and complete. It is more than providing food and shelter; it is recognizing another as family, as brother and sister in Christ.  In all humility, we are to convey with our whole selves, “You are welcome here. Please come in.  You are the Christ for us in this moment.”

On Friday, I went to check on some Bhutanese-Nepali friends who arrived a few weeks ago from Nepal. When they opened the door for me, they folded their hands, bowed their heads and greeted me by saying, “Namaste.” Chittester says that in India, “Namaste means I honor the place in you where the entire universe resides; I honor the place in you of love, of light, of truth, of peace.  I honor the place within you where if you are in that place in you and I am in that place in me, we are as one.”

In their humble home, I received the gifts of hospitality, presence and service. They made a space for me to sit on the sofa and gave me a cold drink.  A family member walked next door to find a neighbor to interpret so they could tell me about their first few weeks in Nashville. One of the children brought a puzzle over to where I was sitting and invited me to put it together with her. They taught me how to say some words in Nepalese, and we all laughed together as I tried to remember and pronounce them correctly.

I learned a couple of things that day about hospitality. One is that in welcoming and receiving Christ in the poor and the pilgrims, I am also welcomed and received as Christ by them. True Christian hospitality is more than simply receiving the gift of Christ in the poor; it is also a return of the gift.  It is to recognize and honor the love, light, truth and peace of the Divine in one another.

The other thing I learned about hospitality from my Bhutanese-Nepali friends is that it isn’t so much what one does for others as it is the way in which one does it. One can merely give another food and drink or one can give it in the spirit of fellowship and communion.  One can simply offer a guest the comforts of the house or one can take the time to share life’s joys with them. Hospitality is not simply receiving the stranger; it is welcoming a brother or sister home.

Caren is a student at Vanderbilt University Divinity School currently interning with World Relief Nashville for the 2011-2012 academic year.

The Road Less Traveled

There are approximately 16 million refugees on planet Earth today.  (There are an additional 26 million persons who are internally displaced, meaning they have not crossed a national border but are in hiding within their own country.) Approximately 77,000 refugees will be resettled in the United States this year, and approximately 450 of these persons will be resettled by World Relief Nashville this Fiscal Year. 

Last week, I greeted a family upon their arrival to America . This family escaped from Bhutan crossing over the border into Nepal to a refugee camp over twenty years ago.  They lived in the camp in Nepal in huts made of bamboo for eighteen years, which is approximately the average length of stay in a refugee camp.

Eventually, after years of waiting, after having their stories verified, their credentials checked and their health and employment status deemed acceptable, they boarded a plane in Katmandu bound for Delhi.  In Delhi, they had a 9 hour layover in a very crowded and chaotic airport.  From Delhi, they flew to Brussels where they changed planes again for their flight to New York. In New York, they changed planes for the 4^th time and flew to Chicago.  In Chicago, they boarded their final plane for Nashville.  When they arrived here, they were joyful and elated but exhausted, overwhelmed and hungry. Yet, even as their journey out of Nepal was ending, they would soon begin again a new journey, orientation and adjustment to life in the United States.

--Caren Teichmann

Caren is a student at Vanderbilt University Divinity School currently interning with World Relief Nashville for the 2011-2012 academic year.