Running

This.

There is a gentle sort of irony to filling shoeboxes in a week where the world is still reeling from terror attacks, scrambling over each other to say the right thing, do the right thing, let in or keep out the right or the wrong sorts of people according to who we understand those people to be.

Christians around me throw scriptures like it's a food fight, this one picking out a few kernels of the Exodus story and declaring that immigration is only allowed for believers, others answering with larger globs from Mosaic Law or the teachings of Christ, welcoming strangers and refugees as a reminder that "we too" were once sojourners in Egypt.

Strangers in a strange land and those who have settled into world that is not our home.

I am reminded that we fight terror with Love, that flowers and red and green boxes have a simple power to speak of Christ, to speak of a Resurrection that casts out fear.

This is a little of what it looks like to be a resurrection people, these shaking elderly hands that bring in a stack of boxes and a careful check, these little ones who cluster around a shipping carton that probably weighs more than any of them to carry it like a colony of chattering ants.

High schoolers who come in to load a semi trailer, puzzle piece a carton as full as it can be, fill shoeboxes, or "simply" stand around to pray. Middle schoolers who bake and frost cookies and finish their day by quietly straightening everything that could possibly be straightened.

Quilters who sew dresses, backpacks, and hacky sacks. Families who bring in dinner and snacks. Parents who drop off their children to volunteer and parents who stay with them to do the same.

While Facebook is filled with the red and blue of the French flag and the answering cries not to forget the rest of the story, not to forget Lebanon or Nigeria, not to forget Syria itself, when old stories surface as people dig for answers, for reason to be afraid.

We collect thousands and thousands of presents, as if a simple gift had the power to bring healing to hurting world.

And, maybe, in its echo of Truth, it does.

"For God so loved...that he GAVE..."

Because it is harder to fear or to demonize or to brush under the rug a child that you have made a shoebox for. Because, there is a power to putting faces, to putting souls, to these people that we like to discuss in the abstract.

Faces are powerful.

I think of a friend in Kenya who found himself running with a crowd of others from trouble that a few men who shared his skin, his hair, his ethnicity had stirred up. As they fled to a safer area, one of those beside him did a sudden double take and began to shirk away in fear. "Woman," I can hear the incredulous grace as he tells the story, "I am running just the same as you."

And, I think of the tens of thousands of voices that would tell us the same thing.

Think of planting trees in a town outside of a sprawling refugee camp, think of long waits in the lotto for resettlement and hurried journeys over dusty and muddy roads to the UNHCR when -- and if -- your number is ever pulled.

I think of the intense vetting process that holds back so many from ever even visiting the United States and the discomfort of sitting in a crowed office, surrounded by a language that you are barely learning, as your papers are stamped again and again and there is still no certainty of a visa.

I think of stateless children having their arm scarred to prove that they belong and a small, half finished church that echoes with the squawking toys of two hundred children. Children who may or may not have any way to prove that they exist.

Stateless.

I think of a coming advent season and a refugee savior.

And, I wonder how much of the world would tell us that same thing. They would start by reminding us of our humanity, remind us of the star dust and the life blood and the breath of God that flows through our veins, and then they would whisper/speak/shout those all important words.

"I am running, just the same as you."

When kids wander the halls of my middle school calling out, "Not afraid!" When there's hardly time to focus on a single mess before a dozen more have cropped up to take its place. When we pack these endless cartons and hold out a hand to help little brother up to where we are.

We're all running.

Are we running a race that speaks of Love?