“Do we have to do this, Mom? I don’t want to go.” My son’s words echoed aloud the thoughts going through my own head. I didn’t want to go, either. It wasn’t that I didn’t care or that I don’t like to serve…it was just that I didn’t want to care and didn’t want to serve on that particular day. I was in a “leave me alone and let me be” kind of mood, exacerbated by the knowledge that I was heading out with my family to volunteer at a camp for inner city kids on a 94 degree day in oppressive humidity. I just didn’t want to go. My kids didn’t, either. I couldn’t let them know I was with them, though, so I put on my game face (which my husband saw right through and my kids probably did, too) and got into the car for the hour long drive. I didn’t know what the camp director would need us to do that day, but I was convinced that it would involve sitting out in the baking sun, weeding. I didn’t want to go.

As we made our way to the camp, I prayed…not deep, spiritual, heartfelt prayers…but short, terse, honest prayers. “I don’t want to go. I know I’m acting like a spoiled brat. Forgive me for being so selfish. But right now I’m feeling selfish. Help me stop being so selfish.” By the time we turned into the parking lot, I wasn’t full of joyful enthusiasm, but I was able to choke out the words, “Teach me a lesson today and help me be a blessing to others.”

When we arrived, the campers were still in the dining hall eating breakfast. My sons inched towards the building as dozens of sets of eyes stared out the windows at this nervous looking family of four. “I feel really awkward, Mom,” one of my boys said.” With a fake lilt in my voice, I replied, “Don’t be silly. You’ll be fine. We’re going to have a great day.” I didn’t believe it, and neither did he.

We went into the camp office to chat with the director and find out how we could help that day. She gave us the rundown of the camp schedule for the day and told Paul about the punch list of maintenance items that he could work through. My older son quickly volunteered to run around with Paul wielding a hammer. Then she turned to me and said, “We could use your help with crafts today.”

Crafts?

I’d rather weed.

Please, let me weed…

Crafts. Involving children and paint. I was going to have to keep my game face on all day.

But then she really got my attention.

“You picked an interesting week to visit us this summer. This is the only week all summer when we have refugees.”

What did she just say?

Refugees. My heart has always bled for refugees. God had just gotten my attention and he was going to keep it all day.

I would be exaggerating and probably outright lying if I said that I come from a line of refugees. But it wouldn’t be exaggerating to say that I have family members whose life experiences have, in many ways, closely resembled the hardships experienced by refugees. I think of my Jewish grandfather living in Shanghai during World War II and likely forced into a ghetto by the Japanese with 18,000 other Jewish people fleeing Europe for what became “The Port of Last Resort,” where he died. I think of my father, for all practical purposes, orphaned at age 5 and making his way out of communist China in his teens, ultimately landing in the deep American south speaking little English and trying to figure out which restroom a man with olive skin was supposed to use.

Over the years, as Dad has slowly told his stories and as I’ve researched what it meant for my grandfather to be part of the Jewish community in Shanghai during the war, I have come to appreciate the life I live now on a level so deep that any story of immigrants struggling to make it in this country or refugees desperately trying to make it to this country regularly reduces me to tears.

I’ve always wanted to help. But the need is so great. What could I do? Where to begin?

Why not begin at camp?

After breakfast, the kids had some free time before transitioning to their scheduled activities for the day. Paul and Cameron were already out on the property hammering and sawing away. Leyton stood on the periphery of a circle of kids, watching them play on the blacktop.

It was easy to pick out the refugees – the richness of their accents gave them away. Every so often they would revert to their native tongues and be reminded by the counselors to speak only in English. They were playing four square. After a few minutes, one of them turned to Leyton and asked, “Do you want to play?” Leyton lit up and jumped in line. The boy, whose name I won’t use, but who I named in my heart, “The Boy with the Impish Grin” took Leyton under his wing. Clearly a leader in the group, he made sure that no one took advantage of the boy from Southborough who was used to a different set of rules and who had never executed a spin move with the four square ball before. I watched as my boy moved from box 1 all the way up to box 4 under the protective eye of a refugee from Africa.

We transitioned to activity time and I helped the first group of kids start their painting projects. The woman in charge of crafts is a teacher in the Worcester public schools. She happened to be driving by the camp one day and noticed a number of her students playing in the field. She stopped and inquired about the camp and was so impressed that she showed up as a volunteer. She knew the kids. She knew their stories.

Her voice kept cracking as she whispered to me. “You can’t even imagine it. The agency that helps them transition to the States does a pretty good job of getting them here, but then they drop them in an apartment and virtually disappear. There’s almost no support after that. Depending on where they’re from, they arrive here never having turned a door knob before. They’ve never walked down the stairs. I watched a woman wearing her flowing traditional dress and carrying a baby, try to walk down a set of stairs, terrified. I reached out my hand to hold her steady and when she had made it safely to the bottom, she buried her face in my shoulder and sobbed.”

My personal wrecking had begun.

As the children painted, the creativity poured out of them. They elevated the project from simple crafts to works of art. One girl, with the poise and perfect posture of a young woman who had likely balanced many a heavy burden on her head back home, blended the colors together so stunningly that I stood over her work and stared. My words, “That’s beautiful,” sounded so simple and stupid and trite, but I couldn’t come up with any other words to convey what was whirling through my mind. I won’t use her name here, but in my heart I named her, “Regal.”

One boy, whose name I won’t use, but who I named in my heart, “The Boy with the Electric Smile,” had tribal scars on his face. The camp director had told me that he and his older brother (also at camp and with similar scarring) had lost their mother prior to coming to the States. Children often asked them about the scarring on their faces, but those inquiries were met with anger. The boys would lash out, yelling, “I don’t want to talk about it. It’s not your business.” Nobody knew their stories.

Somehow, “The Boy with the Electric Smile” took a liking to Leyton and specifically asked if Leyton could join him when the group went on a nature walk. Leyton + nature + a friend is always a winning combination so the two of them went off together. After lunch, Leyton came and sat next to me. Very quietly he said, “‘The Boy with the Electric Smile’ asked me if I knew why he has scars on his face. I said that I didn’t. Then he told me, ‘I got them when my mother died.’”

We pulled out my phone and Googled “tribal scarification” and learned something new. The scarring is used for different things, one of which is to mark a significant life event, like the birth of a baby or the loss of a loved one. Without warning, a raw reality in the world had collided with my nine year old’s life experience. He sat silently and let that sink in.

As the groups rotated through the craft cabin, “The Boy with the Impish Grin” came to paint. He was friendly and helpful. He wanted to help clean up. He wanted to carry the supplies back to the main storage room. He wanted to be useful. He was such a doll and such a pleasure. He was quickly becoming my favorite.

I remembered something the camp director had told me at the beginning of the day. There was a boy in attendance whom she had been strongly warned against accepting into the camp. His teachers and his neighbors all reported him to be wild and destructive. Taking him for a week of overnight camp would be a big mistake. As I considered all the boys I’d met so far that day, my curiosity was piqued. I asked her which boy was “that boy.” She answered, “The Boy with the Impish Grin.”

I couldn’t believe it. The boy who had invited Leyton to play. The boy who was a clear leader. The boy who had been Leyton’s ally on the four square court. The boy whose eyes sparkled with every complement. The boy who insisted on helping. That boy had come with a warning. In my heart, I renamed him, “The Boy Who Needs to be Needed.” I had fallen in love with that boy.

But my wrecking for the day was not complete. The heat of that 94 degree day was broken up for the children by a nice long swim in the camp pool. The girls swam first, then the boys. While the girls swam, I sat at a picnic table and was joined by two boys I hadn’t yet met. I asked the first one where he was from.

“I’m from Iraq,” he said, “I speak Arabic and another language. I speak another language spoken only by Christians. I have been here four months.” Children were swimming in a pool. Children were playing on a basketball court. And I was sitting at a picnic table with an Iraqi Christian. A refugee. I remembered words spoken earlier by the camp director: “You cannot imagine the things some of these children have seen.” I looked at “The Boy with the Serene Face” and wondered.

What have you seen?

I was wrecked.

But God wasn’t done with me yet.

The final straw came when the boy from Guatemala sat at the table. I won’t use his name, but in my heart I named him, “The Boy Bubbling Over with Joy.” He was all smiles, all the time. We chatted about Guatemala. We laughed over the cold sting of his first winter in Massachusetts. And then I asked him if he was enjoying camp. “Oh yes, very much,” he replied.

“What is the highlight of camp for you?” I asked.

“They feed us three times a day!” he answered.

And the wrecking was complete.

We did end up weeding that afternoon. My two boys and I sat in a flower bed in the sun on a 94 degree, humid day, and we weeded. As we dug into the dirt, we talked about the significance of weeding at a camp that ministers to children who have so little and have suffered so much. I told them that weeding may seem insignificant, but by doing it, they were communicating to these kids that they were worthy of having beauty in their lives.

As we drove away from the camp late that afternoon, I tucked the contact information for the teacher in the Worcester public schools into my pocket. I told her that I wanted to keep in touch with her so she could tell me about critical needs that came through her classroom filled with refugee children. It wasn’t going to change the world, but it was at least a start.

I also had one son quietly processing all he had seen and experienced that day and another son begging his father and me to let him stay. “I love everything about that camp,” he said, “I don’t want to leave.”

Funny how that happened. He didn’t want to go. And then he didn’t want to leave.

Last year, I joined a group of women in a Bible study on the book of Nehemiah by Kelly Minter. You can find the link to the study guide here. The question challenging me from the back cover asked me, in big block letters, every time I picked up that book, “Is Your Heart Breakable?” It was a challenging study and I wondered what God would show me with it. Now, after one day of summer camp, I can say that my heart is not just breakable. It is broken.

What breaks yours?

We’re not all wired the same way. We have not all had the same life experiences. God has not placed the same burdens on our hearts. Our hearts do not all break to the same degree over the same injustices in the world. But any heart seeking after God’s own heart is liable to break over something. Do you know, yet, what that something is for you? Is it time, now, to find out? If you’ve known for a while (like I did), is it time, now, to act?

The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit. Psalm 34:18, NIV

“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’” Matthew 25:39-40, NIV

If your heart breaks for refugees, or if you simply want to help the poor and oppressed, you can find information at the following websites:

World Vision

International Justice Mission

If you live in Boston, you might find the information in the following post helpful:

10 Things You Can Do From Boston to Help Refugees

If you’d like to introduce your child to the plight of refugee children, I recommend the following book for older elementary/young teens (incidentally, on the Southborough summer reading list):

A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park

If you’ve never attended a Bible study and are intrigued by the thought, you can send me a private message through this site, through facebook, or at racheljackson913@gmail.com. Maybe you’d like to investigate the book of Nehemiah and learn about the unique calling God may have on your life to minister to people living in situations that break your heart.

Maybe you’d like to investigate another topic or aspect of life and you’re wondering if the Bible really has anything valuable or helpful to say about that. It might be encouraging for you to know that there are both men and women out there teaching the Bible in ways that are interesting, stimulating, challenging, funny, and relevant to whatever you are going through right now. All you have to do to find out is ask.