A First World Problem!

As I was sitting in my chair this morning, finishing the first cup of coffee for the day, I was feeling sorry for myself. After all I had gotten up extra early when the alarm went off at 7:30 am, because service men were scheduled to arrive sometime between 8:30 and noon. They were coming to fix a ‘first world’ problem, the remote control was no longer ‘talking’ to our fireplace. Poor me!!! Of course we weren’t without the auxiliary heat the fireplace provides in our apartment on the lower level of the house. I could still turn it on and off manually. As I said, it was a first world problem!

This quote from the poem ‘Home’ by Warsan Shire, a London-based Somali writer, poet, editor and teacher, first came to my attention when the picture of Alan Kurdi, a three-year-old Syrian boy of Kurdish ethnic background who drowned on 2 September 2015 in the Mediterranean Sea. He and his family were Syrian refugees trying to reach Europe amid the European refugee crisis.

“you have to understand,

that no one puts their children in a boat

unless the water is safer than the land”

As of January 30, 2017, her words "No one leaves home unless/home is the mouth of a shark", from the same poem, were called "a rallying call for refugees and their advocates”.

As I was refilling the coffee carousel with pods for the Keurig machine and loading clothes into the automatic washing machine, I was reflecting on our sense of entitlement, on how far removed any of us are from the horror expressed in Shire’s poetry. I literally can’t even imagine how people survive in the world she is describing so vividly. The minor inconveniences of living in a first world setting, such as servicemen who don’t arrive on time, running out of hot water at inconvenient times, and not having room in the refrigerator for the food we have gotten in for a holiday meal become ludicrous in the face of so much suffering and terror.

Yes, accepting refugees into this country might cost us something, perhaps even impact our relationship with our neighbour to the south, but what it will cost us is small in comparison with the both the loss of life, and of personal safety that the refugees have already suffered. The ideal would be to restore their homelands to a place of safety but until that can be done we are called, as followers of Jesus, to act and to act now.

‘I was hungry and you fed me,

I was thirsty and you gave me a drink,

I was homeless and you gave me a room,

I was shivering and you gave me clothes,

I was sick and you stopped to visit,

I was in prison and you came to me.’ [Matthew 25:35-36]

You can read the complete poem ’Home’ here:

http://seekershub.org/blog/2015/09/home-warsan-shire/

Comments

UnknownFebruary 15, 2017 at 4:50 PM
Good reminders to all of us. Thank you Lynn:)

... and I hope you get that remote fixed soon!
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