On Thursday, the Trump administration announced its intention to set a refugee ceiling of just 18,000 for FY 2020.
This drastic cut comes at one of the most vulnerable points in the refugee crisis. Currently, over 70 million people have been forcibly displaced around the world, 26 million of whom are refugees. These refugees are fleeing war. They’re searching for safety. They’re looking to nations like America and wondering, “Who will help us?”
It is in times like these, when we feel paralyzed, we must seek the God who moves.
As we feel the weight of despair for the millions without a home, we turn to the God of hope. We lament for their suffering, we cry out to God for their aid, and we remember it is God who holds all things.
In his book, Guerillas of Grace: Prayers for the Battle, author Ted Loder shares a prayer for when things feel too much. Perhaps you, too, feel the weight of “too much.” We invite you to lament along with us as we cry out on behalf of refugees and displaced people around the world.
Sometimes It Just Seems To Be Too Much
by Ted Loder
Sometimes, Lord,
it just seems to be too much:
too much violence, too much fear;
too much of demands and problems;
too much of broken dreams and broken lives;
too much of war and slums and dying;
too much of greed and squishy fatness
and the sounds of people
devouring each other
and the earth;
too much of stale routines and quarrels,
unpaid bills and dead ends;
too much of words lobbed in to explode
and leaving shredded hearts and lacerated souls;
too much of turned-away backs and yellow silence,
red rage and the bitter taste of ashes in my mouth.
Sometimes the very air seems scorched
by threats and rejection and decay
until there is nothing
but to inhale pain
and exhale confusion.
Too much of darkness, Lord,
too much of cruelty
and selfishness
and indifference…
Too much, Lord,
too much,
too bloody,
bruising
brain-washing much.
Or is it too little,
too little of compassion,
too little of courage,
of daring,
of persistence
of sacrifice;
too little of music
and laughter
and celebration?
O God,
make of me some nourishment
for these starved times,
some food for my brothers and sisters
who are hungry for gladness and hope,
that, being bread for them,
I may also be fed
and full.