January 2022 — Kristen Welch

“Love is the greatest force in the universe. It is the heartbeat of the moral cosmos. He who loves is a participant in the being of God.” Martin Luther King

I checked the time and tried to mentally calculate the line of traffic ahead of me. The hospital on the other end of the phone and city confirmed that visiting hours would end soon.

I would have 30 minutes to spend with my dad. He was in the hospital again with a heart issue.

I was having my own kind of heart problems. I had just spent the last 8 hours and 8 weeks assisting Afghan refugees in settling into their new lives in Houston. As I drove, I thought about the chaos –and the grief–of the day.

The front row seat into the lives of these beautiful people was messing up my heart. In the last two months, I’ve lost count how many incredibly hospitable and warm Afghan people I’ve met, arriving from military bases around the world where they fled when Kabul fell.We have collected food, delivered groceries, enrolled kids in school, put beds together, unpacked welcome kits, picked up new families from the airport, collected couches and delivered tables. We are helping people who helped us.

And we need more help than ever to continue.

I pulled into the hospital parking lot with 28 minutes to spare and made my way to my dad’s room. I was getting a quick update from my dad and telling him about my day with refugees when the cardiologist came in. He introduced himself and mentioned his background in the Middle East.

My dad told the doctor that I had been serving new refugees from his home region. The doctor stopped, turned and said, “Thank you for helping them. These are beautiful people who have been through so much.” It turns out this doctor would end up solving the mystery of the pain in my dad’s heart by performing a surgery no else had thought of.

Little did I know, one of the young refugee women I helped move into an apartment that day was also a cardiologist. She had been practicing for 3 years when she had hours to feel Afghanistan with her family.We have since spent a lot of time together talking about her long and hard journey to practice as a cardiologist in the USA. The expensive books, the tests–it’s daunting. At one point, she said this mountain is too big. I got tears in my eyes and said, “Do you know how to climb a mountain?

One step at a time.

And in a turn of events only God could orchestrate, her first of three sets of book and tests have been provided for and she now has my dad’s cardiologist’s phone number with his offer to help.

Sometimes I feel like God gives us tiny glimpse into His heart for His people. And it opens our heart.

I’ve sat on floors in completely bare apartments, humbly accepting the only seat in the home, shared one piece of fruit — their only and best—with my family, and experienced beautiful hospitality. I’ve listened to horror stories of escape and cramped cargo planes, and witnessed the unspeakable grief that comes with losing everything and worst of all, watched the painful memory cross the face of someone who left loved ones behind in Afghanistan under the rule of the Taliban.

The past 8 weeks (and 12 years in Kenya) have been holy and horrible and more than once I felt like God was lifting this veil to show me how much He loves us in the weaving together of our stories and how far he will go after the one...one pregnant teen, one mom who put her daughter into prostitution because she doesn’t have access to dignified work, one cardiologist who can help another, one American mom who needs to open her heart to end up healing it….

In the next 4 weeks, Mercy House Global’s partner- YMCA International— is expecting the largest wave of Afghan evacuees in Houston to date.

They’ve asked us to fill a couple of specific gaps:

1. Continue to provide and deliver groceries until families can get food stamps (locals sign up here). If you’re not, download the Mercy House Global app and give towards food (it cost about a $1000 a week to feed 40 families).

2. Assemble newborn welcome kits for the large population of pregnant women arriving (Here’s the Amazon wish list so anyone can participate)

Will you open your heart and be a part of one of the greatest opportunities to love on a group of unreached people who faced hell only to escape and become our neighbors?

It turned out it’s just what my heart needs.