Laura Parker

“I’m giving such a gift of service today,” I nobly thought to myself as I scurried around scraping jelly off chairs and kicking goldfish crackers back under the couch where they belonged.  With three small children, hosting anyone for anything is quite the chore, and today we were set to have a family of six refugees from Myanmar, nine of our friends to meet them, and our own clan of five—all in our smallish, very-normal house.  And as my six-year-old demonstrated trampoline-usage to kids who didn’t speak English, the adults crammed around our dinner table, elbows knocking, and questions firing. 

“What is going on in Mynamar (formerly Burma) right now?”

“Why did you have to flee?”

“How did you escape?”

And our Asian guest, we’ll call him Lee, while hesitating to be in the spotlight, began to humbly share his family’s story.   As a man born in Myanmar to a persecuted ethnic group, our new friend was marked by the military government for arrest because of his ethnicity and his outspoken Christian faith.   Knowing that an “arrest” in reality meant a “permanent disappearance,” our friend frantically gathered money to buy a chance at freedom.  Men, whom we would label ‘human traffickers,’  can be paid to smuggle refugees across borders into more hospitable countries.  Lee said a tearful goodbye to his wife and four sons, handed over wrinkled bills, and climbed into the trunk of a van, along with four others, buying a chance of escape.  And as the trunk lid closed, our friend explained in broken English that he only had a 50% chance of ending up safely across the border into a neighboring country.  There was an equal chance that the trafficker could drive him, along with the others in the trunk, to the coast, where the men would be sold into a life of slave labor on fishing boats and the women into lives of prostitution.  This was the risk, the best odds a refugee had to avoid death at the hands of his own government. 

Dessert and drink-refills forgotten, I sat transfixed with my American friends as we began to then listen to Lee’s wife share her experience of the last several years.  Lee translated while she  spoke of military raids in her village, abuse by government soldiers, and an escape from the country with her own four sons by train one year after her husband had fled.  Living for three years in Malaysia, without the protection of citizenship and under great prejudice, this family of six was eventually relocated to the United States.  And six weeks later, their teenage sons were getting trampoline lessons from my first grade daughter in our backyard.  The statistics had faces now, and I had learned firsthand a story that spoke louder than any reports I googled for research or pamphlets I received in the mail. 

The Gift was Mine.  And after a few hours, our new friends bowed their grateful goodbyes, and we said our parting prayers.  The wife clutched me with an embrace that said she had found a sister in a land of white faces, and then the door closed shut.  The quiet descended, and I turned to the mound of dishes the hosting had created.  But I was changed, now.  Gratitude had replaced my former attitude of self-inflicted, self-approving martyrdom.  I had dined with royalty that day and had been privileged to hear their accounts of a  faith in God that was unshaken by suffering and persecution.  And suddenly, cleaning the dishes and hosting 20 people in our home was more of an honor than anything else.  

Without a doubt, I was the one who had received the greater gift that day.

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