This post is not about the politics of immigration policy.
But it is about some of the protests that have taken place over the past several weeks against the huge influx of children who have crossed our borders seeking asylum.
The pictures we have seen on TV are, to my mind, absolutely appalling. Men and women with rage on their faces and hate in their shouted slogans, confronting buses filled with children.
Do any of these protesters ever think about what it must be like for a child, a stranger in a strange land, without parents or any other protector, to be confronted with what must appear to them as a screaming mob that hates them? What kind of terror and insecurity must that induce in the mind of a nine or ten year old child?
I find it impossible to believe that any of the protesters would want their own children, if forced for some reason to seek asylum in another country, to be greeted that way. Yet those who claim to be Christian surely know that Jesus commanded:
And just as you want men to do to you, you also do to them likewise. Luke 6:31 (NKVJ)
And by greeting these refugees with no welcome, no love, but with only a harsh demand that they be expelled from the country immediately, with no consideration of what would then happen to them, do the protesters really see themselves as reflecting the heart of God?
You shall not afflict any widow or fatherless child. 23 If you afflict them in any way, and they cry at all to Me, I will surely hear their cry.
Exodus 22:22-23
The policy issues concerning what to do about the refugees who turn up unbidden on our doorstep are complex, and merit serious discussion and debate.
But, in my opinion, protests that communicate only hate, with no concern at all for children who have risked their lives to come here in order to escape worse dangers back home, are not something in which any true follower of Christ ought to be involved.
Ron Franklin
Photo credit: IowaPolitics.com via flickr