How would you feel if you were the stranger in need of some help?
UNDERSTANDING another person is something that is very challenging but we can all as a community try to imagine being the other person we are meeting or hearing about and try to imagine how we would feel if we were in their situation.
When I try to use this way of thinking, it often helps me to respond to issues of life and to interact with people that are different from me in an empathetic way.
I encourage us to take some time to try to imagine being the “other” before we respond or act.
We are living in a world that is complex, yet we sometimes act or respond as if we know everything.
I would like to invite you to imagine rocket missiles exploding in your street overnight and you fleeing to the next town. What would be your priority? What would you carry with you as you flee?
Can you imagine yourself landing at an airport called Beira, in Mozambique a month later?
Imagine what questions the border force officers of Mozambique will ask you. Can you imagine your responses in Portuguese to the questions asked to you?
Can you try to imagine yourself being interviewed by officers who are all black men?
How would you feel in the situation, considering your individual travel experience?
Imagine what will be going through your mind, as through a volunteer translator, the senior officer is telling you they are going to move you to a town called Manica near the Zimbabwean border. When they escort you to the bus station to catch a bus to Manica from Beira, what will be going through your mind? Who would you like to be with, as you go through all this?
Imagine yourself in a Manica supermarket trying to buy a drink and prices are marked in Metical and goods labelled in Portuguese, and you working out prices into pounds and trying to find a familiar drinks.
Imagine getting the news the following week that your application for refugee status has not been successful and you are being flown to a camp in Antananarivo, Madagascar, the following week as you can no longer live in Manica.
We can read this article as an imaginary piece of work, but there are people living in similar circumstances in our town, country and world today.
Take some time to imagine a what God would like you to do as you meet people who may be going through this. I would like to think God would empathise with people who find themselves in countries which are not their own as God experienced this in the infant Jesus Christ when he was in Egypt.