“What do you call people who have been driven from their homes with only the clothes on their backs, unsure if they will ever be able to return, and forced to build a new life in a strange place?” That was the question one news agency was asking in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, that ripped into New Orleans in September 2005. ‘Refugees’ would seem to be the natural word. Yet some people objected to that, arguing that the word was degrading and made them sound like second-class citizens.
It is interesting to think about this as Christians. Are we happy to be thought of as ‘refugees’? I guess it’s not the first word that may come to mind. Yet that is exactly what we are! A Christian believer is someone who has fled to Christ and taken refuge in him; and he is the place of true blessing, a real home, where we have found all we need and more than we could ever imagine. Jesus is the only true refuge: “Blessed are all who take refuge in him” (Psalm 2:12).
By contrast, our culture prides itself in aiming to be independent and self-sufficient, making it on our own without any help. Being a refugee makes it clear that we are dependent, and can’t make it on our own – but then we were never meant to make it on our own. Perhaps, though, we shouldn’t glory so much in our own refugee status as in the status of our glorious Refuge, in whom we have taken shelter and found a home.