For I Was a Stranger, and You . . .

I was a missionary for many years.

Often, missionaries find writing newsletters home to be one of the more difficult parts of their life. It can be hard to find topics that will interest and inspire your supporters.

I never had that problem.

I was raised in a wonderful Conservative Baptist Church in Oregon. I love my childhood church. They were consistently supportive of me, and my church’s membership funded a large majority of my ten plus years of missionary service.

They always loved my newsletters home. I worked in several “difficult access” countries: religiously difficult, politically difficult, and economically difficult.

I wrote stories about the risks we took to fulfill our missionary calling. In many locations we had to find creative ways to get in and out of countries just to fulfill our work.

In one country, we were labeled “false believers.” The government would never give us a religious visa as missionaries, so we lived as “tourists.” To do this, we had to leave the country every couple of months and reenter by another border crossing in order to live as perpetual tourists. If creative, we could keep up this ploy for years.

In another country, missionaries had to invent other reasons for living there. Some took the status of “student.” Student visas were not highly scrutinized, and even though we often “forgot” to enroll in classes, we felt justified because we were in fact “students of the culture.”

Many times I performed old fashioned smuggling of Christian materials. We found wonderfully creative ways to move large stacks of papers across hostile borders. The spaces behind the paneling of a car door, for instance, can hold a surprising amount of books and materials.

One time, one of my missionary friends lost her documentation while we were traveling. She lost it in a particularly ill-fated location, a forgotten corner of the world where it was nearly impossible to get documents replaced. After much praying and scheming we devised a plan. First we chose a poorly staffed border crossing, over a little used mountain pass. We intentionally crammed our entire party, nearly a dozen people, into a single, fairly small vehicle. Our friend was placed in the back row, in the center. The plan, to hand the bored and power-intoxicated border guards our entire stack of passports and hope that in the process of matching foreigners to documents, they might lose count. (Don’t all Americans look alike?) It was a sweat-inducing and prayer-triggering thirty minutes of scrutiny. Then, at the very moment it seemed our ruse would be discovered, there was a sharp shout from the dilapidated security house. When the security force returned, agitated and confused, they simply abandoned the head-count and hastily waved our team through. That was one of our closer calls.

I have stolen across a country at war on a train. This country considered the USA to be a devil. I have endured interrogations, bailed friends out of jail and executed plans to avoid secret police, all to ensure that our missionary work could continue.

Like I said, the adventures were many and the newsletters were easy to write.

Back home in Oregon, my church seemed so proud of me. They praised me for my faith. They praised me for my courage. They found my stories inspiring. They cheered for every hurdle we overcame. They supported every creative solution to our political and legal problems.

How about you? Did you find yourself cheering when you read these stories, like my church back home? Do you find yourself supporting such acts of creativity and courage?

If so, then you have just cheered for an undocumented worker. You have just supported someone who sneaks across borders in order to do a job that only exists on the other side. You have just embraced the courage of someone who breaks the law because they believe in a better world that can be attained only by ignoring the laws of the land they have entered.

For I was a stranger …

We need to be careful how we wield the categories of “illegal.” When the church partakes in illegal practices we often defend it, champion it and advocate for it. When others partake in very similar illegal practices we use a broad brush to paint them as wrong.

Regardless of your political position on U.S. immigration policy we can all strive to use godly language about our neighbors. Words are important. Words have deep meaning, theological meaning. When we refer to a person as “illegal,” that is an identity statement. It is a theological statement. I believe sentences like—”We have to stop those illegals from crossing the border”—sorrows the heart of God. A behavior can be illegal, but not a person. A person is a spiritual entity, a beloved creation of God. People cannot be “illegal” in their identity. People are beautiful. They are eternally valuable. Let’s treat them as such.

Tony “The Beat Poet” Kriz is author in residence at Warner Pacific in Portland, Oregon. His most recent book is Neighbors and Wise Men: Sacred Encounters in a Portland Pub and Other Unexpected Places (Thomas Nelson, 2012). You can find Tony at tonykriz.com or on Twitter.