Along with Benedict Cumberbatch, more than 100,000 British households have volunteered to take in refugees from Ukraine. The very embodiment of Jesus’s exhortation to love our neighbour, surely?
Many, of all faiths and none, will have seriously considered what it would be like to have a traumatised stranger or family of strangers in their peaceful home. What would be the cost, the danger, the emotional and physical price to pay? What would it be like to help someone at the apex of their need and to respond in a practical way to the global ache for Ukraine?
Perhaps not quite as you imagine. Having taken in a refugee myself, I found the experience to be completely unexpected. In 2019, I took in a woman fleeing from religious persecution in Iran to live with me and my family. She was traumatised, she had left her entire life behind and I had never met nor heard of her until the day I took her home.
Waking on a hot August morning in London in 2019 I had no sense of the change about to sweep through our lives. It was another Sunday, I was a vicar’s wife and despite being tired, I had to find a way to be present for our congregation. Our church in west London was a myriad of different cultures and interesting life stories, but I was drained, wrestling depression and felt like I had nothing left to give to anyone.
When I met Maryam that morning, I listened to her story as I had done on many other occasions with desperate people. I nodded. I smiled sympathetically. I prayed. However, something in me stirred, a prompt from my heart’s depths, the same prompt many others have been feeling recently. I have a spare room.
When I look back now I could not have understood the significance of what I was about to do. The potential for danger, the opportunities for growth, for bravery and, ultimately, for love.
I took her home, both of us wide-eyed and apprehensive. A week earlier Maryam had been folded into a luggage compartment of a coach and smuggled across her country’s border; that same week, I had been in Cornwall on holiday. A bolt of fear woke me at 2.30am. What have we just done? Are my kids okay? I crept out of bed and checked on my son and daughter. They were fast asleep. Silence. The quiet crying I had heard from the spare room earlier that night had stopped. Back in bed I murmured prayers until I fell into an uneasy sleep.
Over the next few days we collected pieces of Maryam’s story and, like shards of broken china, we pieced them together to see her fractured picture of terror and desperation. As Christians in the UK we have experienced relatively little persecution for our faith, and we felt honoured to open our home to someone who had suffered so much for theirs.
Over the next few months, we discovered the complexities of the UK asylum seeker process, more difficult to navigate than I could ever have imagined. Despite our constant help with forms and phone calls, papers and procedure, it felt like Maryam was losing all the time. But, as I joined her in her fight for refugee status, she joined me in my fight against depression. As we each went through a dark night of the soul, we forged a sisterhood, we laughed and cried, we shared and prayed together, and in the darkness we discovered a new level of bravery to face the world.