Whatever you decide



Whoever serves me must follow me. - John 12:26

“You have five minutes to decide,” Sister Valentine told them.

In the spring of 2012, caught between the shelling of the Syrian army and opposing rebels in the Presbyterian church’s elderly care center in Homs, Syria, Sister Valentine asked her employees whether they would stay to care for the older residents.

And then Sister Valentine said, “Whatever you decide, I am staying.” One-by-one, more slowly at first, the other employees also agreed to stay.

Later, Sister Valentine ventured out into the streets alone amidst the rocket fire to buy bread for the residents, so that her employees, all with families, could stay inside the home where they were safer.

Homs, the third largest city in Syria and a religiously diverse community with Sunnis, Alawites and Christians, was under siege for four years until government forces began to prevail in 2015. By May 2017, the Syrian government had reclaimed control of the city.   

The Rev. Mofidi Karajili, pastor of the Presbyterian congregation, arrived in Homs just after the destruction in the city began in 2012. When our group of MCC people visited partner organizations in Syria, he told us it is not common for Protestants and Catholics to share this kind of ministry for the elderly at the care center, but he and Sister Valentine have made a good team.

From the rooftop, Pastor Mofidi points out the severely damaged buildings of the Orthodox, Catholic and evangelical churches nearby. For a period of time after the bombing stopped, all of these churches used the elderly care center for their worship.

Pastor Mofidi shares the ways MCC has provided support for his congregation’s ministries in the city, including food parcels and cash gifts. “Without your help,” he says, “the lives of some of these families would have been entirely dark and some may not have survived.”

Later, we visit the congregation’s Peace Kitchen, which employs several neighborhood women and raises money for the church so that they can help other people in need.

Pastor Mofidi tells us that, since the war, it is very unusual to see Westerners in Syria. He says that when Iraq suffered years before, he did not think to visit them, but we from MCC have come to Syria and MCC is showing others what it means to follow Jesus.

For us visitors, it is people like Sister Valentine and Pastor Mofidi who show us what it means to serve and to follow Jesus.

Ron Byler is executive director of MCC U.S. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

They welcomed us

Image
One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see. (John 9:25) She was addicted to drugs for 20 years. She was in prison and her family broke apart. Her child was in an orphanage and her husband died. Because of her substance abuse, she eventually lost her one arm below her elbow. She saw no way out. She had hit the very bottom. When she came to know God, Natalia says everything changed. She found she had a deep desire to help people like herself and she discovered that her life experiences helped her understand others. “I remember what God did in my life and I have hope that God can touch other peoples’ lives and give them new life, too,” Natalia tells me. In Nikopol, Ukraine, she and Olga and Valodya, both of whom have similar stories to tell of their own, began New Life Charitable Fund a half dozen years ago to help people in prison, or who have drug or alcohol addictions, are HIV positive, homeless or for some other reason need a helping hand. Ukraine has
Read more

God multiplies our efforts

Image
Sister Zita at the La Posada shelter with baby Emmanuel and members of our border learning tour. Photo courtesy of Janae Rempel The jar of meal will not be emptied and the jug of oil will not fail. – I Kings 17:14 Ana Hinojosa remembers growing up on the Texas-Mexico border near Brownsville in the late 80s. Her family’s house was a mile from the border wall and she remembers the extended family gatherings in her back yard. Ana, an MCC immigration staff person, says border patrol agents would rest in the shade of the trees near the front of her house and, in the same day, it would be possible for a family from Mexico to knock on her front door to ask for food or directions. Her family turned no one away. Life on the border can look quite different today. When we enter the Catholic Charities respite center in McAllen, Texas, it is startling to see the contrast from the serenity of the neighborhood outside to the chaos inside. Cesar Matta tells us that, today, the cente
Read more

A river of love

Image
For it is out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks. – Matthew 25:40 “We are happy you are here to see this with your own eyes,” the leader of the Islamic Charities organization in Deir Attieh, Syria tells us, a group of MCC people visiting partner organizations in Syria. “We can’t express enough our heartfelt thanks to you.” Islamic Charities works with 3,000 at risk families affected by the war in the region and relies heavily on the work of volunteers. MCC provides food boxes to Islamic Charities as part of our humanitarian assistance in Syria. When I visit five families who received these food boxes, I recall the heartfelt thanks but feel mostly heart broken.    We visit two families living in a partially constructed apartment complex that stalled when the war began. The first family lives in a small two-room apartment, the mother and her five children and the woman’s father. Her husband is serving in the army. The second family includes seven
Read more