Faithfulness & Heartache
By Jeanette Rojas, Vice Chair of the Juniper Formation Leadership Team and Juniper Formation representative to the Interfaith Immigration Network
My favorite stories from the Bible - and stories in general are the stories of faithfulness. Maybe I have an old soul and maybe I’m prone to melodrama (I blame the telenovelas), but I love how the shepherds who saw the star of Bethlehem were simply working. What miracles have I missed at my day job? I love the women of faithfulness after Jesus’ death who show up to do the hard work of mourning and grieving to be tasked with announcing miracles. What do I miss when I shrink back from the faithfulness a broken heart requires?
The thing that continues to break my heart over and over again is the story of how we fail to love undocumented immigrants. It has broken my heart since I understood what it has meant to have family here and family en el otro lado. I am the granddaughter of migrant farmworkers who picked beets and sugar cane and their bravery to leave behind their language, family, and culture has completely transformed the opportunities I have been given two generations later.
I know this privilege intimately as I try to love and support my family in Mexico while trying to help undocumented youth go to college in my classrooms. My heart has shattered and been paralyzed at the horrors of seeing children in cages and I ache for the 500 children who are still missing today. My heart breaks as I begin to think about essential workers keeping this country fed without any federal benefits, risking their lives for a country that scorns them. My faithfulness fails when the parents and guardians of 11 million DACA recipients are criminalized. The list goes on...
And it is with this broken heart I showed up to lunch on a sunny day in the summer of 2020 on the behalf of Juniper Formation. Behind a mask and sunglasses, I met Anne Kleinkopf of the Interfaith Immigration Network. Over salads and socially distanced, we began dreaming of what it actually means to be faithful to our immigrant community as loving neighbors. We wondered aloud – what skills, tools, knowledge, and resources did people need to love immigrant neighbors well? From these questions, Vecinos was born.
Vecinos is a community of believers whose faith demands action and are radically committed to humanity over borders. Cafecitos is a seven-week virtual space where Vecinos can explore different aspects of faith and immigration with the culmination of a personal action plan on how to serve undocumented immigrants as a loving neighbor. If you, like me, don’t know where to take your breaking heart as a caravan of immigrants makes their way towards us from Honduras, please consider joining us. February 4th, 2021, we will be launching our inaugural cohort, 7pm - 8:30pm, to learn from experts in the field, explore scripture, build community, and hear from immigrants what they need from loving neighbors. You can find more information by contacting Anne here.
This story, like all my favorite stories, is as complicated as it is simple– I am being called to the faithfulness of loving thy neighbor, and my precious wonderful neighbor is an immigrant. I am thankful for a God who lets me play a small role in this story of faithfulness and I am eager to experience what miracles abound when neighbors move beyond heartache over cafecito.
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