Would you help her? Protest! Hide her! Go to jail to protect her! Would I, I keep asking

My father-in-law lost his first wife in a horrible accident on an icy Oregon road. A few, years later he married again, a Christian woman who was a cook at a Christian school. She was a nice lady, who loved her husband and cared for him though years of dementia. But she did have one quirk, she was a racist. When setting behind her in a car my husband teased her, your neck is kind of pink. But really it was red. When she stated that she believed the Japanese really deserved to be interned during the second World War, we asked why they didn’t intern the Italians. Her first husband was Italian. She stated it was because the Japanese were sly. 

Just this morning I read an article from Christianity Today about the internment of Japanese Americans during the second World War. The author, Raymond Chang, writes about visiting one of the internment camps and also about the livelihood and property lost by the imprisoned Japanese. In Chang’s article, “We Should Not Be Silent This Time he writes of those who were Christians: 

“The gospel was certainly the good news that the incarcerated Japanese American Christians clung to. In the face of immense hardship, they refused to let their faith be extinguished. 

They gathered in makeshift chapels and worshiped in the camps, finding solace in the stories of exile in Scripture and trusting that God’s promises were greater than the fences that confined them. They called on the God of justice and mercy, and God met them there.”

 I keep asking these questions, to myself as well as my reader. If you had a neighbor or friend who was an Afghan who faced the almost certain possibility of being deported back to her homeland where she would most certainly be killed, either because she is a Christian or because she had helped the United States government in their war against the Taliban, would you help her? Protest! Hide her! Go to jail to protect her! Would I, I keep asking. 

One of my favorite heroes is Sophie Scholl, a member of the White Rose movement during the nazi years. The White Rose, a Christian group, wrote pamphlets about the injustices, the persecutions, happening during those years. They would leave their writings anywhere and were caught leaving them at the university of Munich. Most of them were beheaded for their actions. 

 The director of the movie about Sophie Scholl and the White Rose movement made this comment about her:

 “I admire her courage. She turned down the ‘golden bridge’ offered her by the integration officer Robert Mohr—thus practically signing her on death sentence. I find that quite startling: how does such a life—affirming positive-minded young woman like Sophie Scholl come to terms with the fact that her life is being taken away from her? And of course as an atheist I ask myself: Is it easier to face death as a believer?” 

nd so I keep asking the questions. There is the gay man, not a gang member, sent to the terrible prison in El Salvador. One congressman keeps asking Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, if she can just find out for Asylee’s mother if he is still alive. She won’t. There is the little girl with brain cancer, a US citizen, sent with her parents to Mexico, at first no time for the seizure medicine she needs—and no right to stay in the United States with her parents until her treatments are finished. No mercy for anyone. 

But there is mercy from God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—who overshadows his people and carries them. So too we are called to have mercy as his children. But still the questions?