Refugees are like our Grandparents
Written By Inasmuch Community Society
Maybe it’s easy to look at asylum seekers and think their plight has nothing to do with us. In the Fraser Valley, Abbotsford in particular, we’d be wrong.
Abbotsford’s history is generationally rich with stories of people fleeing persecution.
Take the Mennonites who settled in the Fraser Valley from the mid 1900’s. They left their lives and homes in Ukraine and the Netherlands and Prussia and sought safety and freedom in the relatively new land of Canada. They too came in search of a better, safer life.
Our grandparents who settled the land in and around Abbotsford, who toiled and worked to build their new lives, who established the City that we love – wanted the same things as people who are fleeing their homelands today:
the freedom to worship in the way they believed to be right
to invest in their new community and to make it their home
to bring up their children in safety
to be free from discrimination and persecution
How quickly we forget those choices our grandparents made. We often fondly remember our ancestors without recalling the sacrifices they made and their choice to find freedom in Canada.
Our grandparents and great-grandparents made the same tough choices that refugee claimants make today:
the choice to pack what belongings they can carry and venture to a strange country
the choice to leave known dangers for unknown ones
the choice to seek protection in a country that has welcomed the newcomer for generations
So what are we to think when we see people crossing the border with their families and their belongings and asking for refugee protection? Let’s not forget our shared history and the risks our forebears took. Let’s instead open our hearts and homes to find compassion for the newcomer. After all, it wasn’t so very long ago that our own families needed the same.
As Menno Simons wrote back in the 16th Century: “True evangelical faith, cannot lie dormant. It clothes the naked, it feeds the hungry, it comforts the sorrowful, it shelters the destitute, it serves those that harm it, it binds up that which is wounded.”