Each step is a prayer.<\/p>\n
Each step is a supplication to the God who knows what it means to wander for months or years on end, searching for a land of promise.<\/p>\n
Each step is a sacred protest, calling out to God for mercy and justice.<\/p>\n
Thus millions of prayers were raised, as friends flew west from nations such as Cameroon and Senegal, as friends walked north from the barrios of Honduras and El Salvador, seeking an answer to their requests to God.<\/p>\n
Earlier this year, I spent time with a delegation of fellow Mennonites at the USA\/Mexico border with New York-based New Sanctuary Coalition (NSC). NSC suggested we used the \u201cfriends\u201d as a way to reshape the narrative of how we name those who seek abundant life and our relationships with them.<\/p>\n
In their journeys toward the southern U.S. border, our friends embodied a desire to experience lives free from abuse. Lives free from war. Lives spent with one\u2019s children or parents. Most of all, these Friends sought life <\/em>itself.<\/p>\n At the San Diego\/Tijuana border, though the pace of the journeys slowed, the prayers did not falter. If anything, the prayers grew more fervent as our friends now faced a barrier they had dreamed of reaching, the entrance to the \u201cPromised Land.\u201d The real and numerous barriers for entry were often more significant than they had imagined \u2013 they were more significant than I had imagined, a U.S. citizen with some awareness of immigration law. Many friends, having walked for months already, now found themselves at the border for additional months, waiting their turn until their number was called (an illegal system that deliberately slowed migrants\u2019 entries into the USA immigration system.)<\/p>\n While still in Mexico, many who sought asylum were prepared by sympathetic USA immigration lawyers for their \u201ccredible fear interview\u201d with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. The entirety of friends\u2019 asylum cases rested on this interview. With their fate hanging in the balance in proving their \u201ccredible fear,\u201d how do our siblings from the Majority World hear Paul\u2019s invitation to the Philippians in 4:6? When Paul urges the believers to \u201cnot worry about anything, but\u2026let your requests be made known to God,\u201d what does that mean for those who face long stays in deplorable detention centers? Or those who are required to await their court hearings \u201cal otro lado<\/em>\u201d \u2013 on the other side in Mexico?<\/p>\n