What Mama Taught Me

I call her mama because she is little, probably four foot nine, but strong, like my grandma; and also because she is family, now. We met in August of 2024, when she arrived in Columbus, Ohio from Tel Aviv, where she had spent 10 years as a refugee, having walked from Eritrea to escape unlivable conditions. When my now-husband and I went to pick up her home-cooked meal from an Ethiopian restaurant the night she flew in, the woman at the bar rolled up injera and lentils from a customer’s plate and fed us with her hands, our first experience of mama’s food the way it is meant to be eaten. We took the hot meal to her hotel and unloaded her eight overflowing bags from the refugee resettlement pick-up truck, getting to know her two boys as we hefted luggage to the third floor. She was tired and we were tired, and that was the beginning. 

Of the 256 families that I helped find houses during my year and a half in resettlement, mama is the only one I’ve walked with longterm. After that first hot night, we found her a house that was both cheap and kind of nice. It had hard wood floors and good light; small, but airy. We moved in beds and food and a tv, and learned that the boys were prone to jumping out of moving cars. I finally took the child locks off of my doors only a few months ago; they’ve gotten much better at buckling their seat belts and staying put after two years in the States. But mama had no community near her, no one from Eritrea in her neighborhood to speak her language and show her the ropes. She had never been taught to read and write in her own language, so mastering English proved harder than expected, even though she had learned to speak Hebrew fluently during her time in Tel Aviv. Language takes time, and mama was lonely. So, the next year, we moved her to a different house, one that was closer to jobs and closer to African grocery stores. Still, the jobs didn’t stick. The boys struggled. The snow, as someone from Israel and Eritrea, was unexpected and unwelcome. The depression lingered. 

My worst fear, for all 256 families but most especially for mama and the boys, was homelessness. I worried they would fall through the cracks, never to be caught or kept. When food stamp benefits were cut for refugees in November of 2025, our group stepped up to cover her grocery bills. When a cosigner was needed for the new apartment, someone else took that on. We worked in overdrive to make sure the family would not be evicted, so as to avoid another trauma in a long line of them throughout her life. But last week, mama invited us over for coffee to share her news. She had quit her job, and at the end of this lease she and the boys would be moving to Seattle, where there is a much larger Eritrean population and more community to rely on. Today, as we discussed plane tickets, I asked her what the plan was. While she has friends in Seattle, none of them can take her in for very long, so she will get set up at the shelter there with a caseworker, and then find a job and learn to support herself from there. 

So here mama was, telling me that she was ready to face the reality of homelessness, my worst fear. It is not what I want for the boys, and it is not what I want for her. But as she told me this today, I saw that she had a plan. Not a plan others had made for her or prescribed for her family, but a plan she had determined herself, with the relationships she had and the knowledge she had gained. And in my heart, I realized that I had gotten it all wrong. These past four years, in the refugee camps, the resettlement housing, the sleepless nights praying a family wouldn’t get evicted — I had wanted to save people from another bout of the brokenness, another grief to endure. But the truth is that the worst thing isn’t a lack of a house; the worst thing is to be alone, and to feel as though you are trapped and without agency in your own life. Mama wasn’t totally alone, but she was lonely, and in some ways we had kept her from being able to make her own decisions. Homelessness is still not what I want for her, but it is the decision that is letting her take ownership of her own life and move forward from there. She looked at peace. 

It has been a year and a half since I left the world of refugee resettlement, and I’m finally taking time to heal my wounds. I’m praying over all 256 families, and releasing their care to the Lord, knowing that he was with them before I met them and that nothing I did or didn’t do for them will make or break their lives, because Christ was with them long after I left. As I was talking through this with someone the other day, she said that it sounds like I don’t have a theology of glory anymore, the kind of belief that tells you that God will fix things, right now, if only you let him. Instead, what mama gave me is a theology of companionship. The brokenness of this world will always be here, until Christ comes to make all things new. I still believe that the Kingdom breaks in through moments and people, but I no longer believe that those Kingdom moments need to be big or flashy to matter. Sometimes, the Kingdom is sitting with a woman and her kids while she makes you coffee and tells you her plans to enter a homeless shelter. Sometimes, maybe even most of the time, the Kingdom is about showing up in the broken places and not fixing anything at all, but bearing witness to God’s goodness in the valleys. Not everything will be fixed. Not everything can be fixed. And still — all shall be well; and all manner of thing shall be well.