temporal1 wrote:boot, is anyone telling you to stop doing as you are? as i read, not to my understanding.
on the other hand, you seem determined to pressure others to follow you; if not, they are wrong, less-than, have ulterior motives, are not Christian, etc.
is this really the message you want to relay?
No, that isn't the message I want to relay.
I certainly don't think everyone needs to work with refugees, not everyone has the same calling.
But Christians in all circles I have been part of have always cared a lot about refugees and our role in helping them. And sometimes I'm feeling a level of callousness here that surprises and concerns me. Real families are separated by the executive order, 50 refugees who were coming to homes with partners in our area's churches were prevented from coming. (The executive order has been temporarily reversed, some of them may be able to come in now. That's a good thing.)
There are some basic facts that I think people need to know - what is currently being done in various countries, what a safe zone is, what a refugee is, what a resettlement program is, the fact that no refugee and nobody from these countries has committed a terrorist act here, the way that refugees are screened, etc. I do think that some things are facts and some things are not, and in a discussion, we need to be able to look at facts together to determine what is true and what is not.
And as Christians, I think it is important to ask what we are going to do, not just speculate about things that could, in theory, be done. There are already programs aimed at helping people in other countries, we don't need to build them from scratch. If that's what someone has a heart for, they can donate or volunteer.
But to me, some of this discussion really does seem to imply "we don't want them here". It doesn't seem to be calling us to do anything at all for them, it implies that there's no need to do that because something else could, in theory, be done for them. And it does not call people to help that other thing happen. There are no safe ones in Syria. Safe zones did not work in Bosnia or in Kurdish Iraq. I don't know that anyone here really wants to establish them.