Immigration Day.
We live in a very diverse community. Many dutch people, hispanics, and people from Asia, the list goes on! Canadiens, every shape and size of Europeans, still, the list goes, and goes. Inspirational people, funny people, christian people, muslim people, crazy people, we’ve got people from the 80s, the 60s, 40s, 20s? Basically, we live in a very diverse place, we call it the world. We live in a very diverse situation, we call it life. We, decided were going to celebrate the different ethnicities that people come from, a day of stories, surprises, and hopefully ending up a bit more thankful for the thinks we have. I met with my interim pastor, Henry Admiral, or, as we call him, Pastor Henry. He was an immigrant from the Netherlands. He was ten years old at the time, and guess what! His family was paid to emigrate! I know right? Crazy. They thought that america was gonna be the bomb! For them, riding the school bus was leisure. They went from a small, no, tiny house to a big one, now, maybe not modern day big, but put yourself in his shoes! I also talked with Dr. Kim of north Korea, who while doing mission work in north Korea was about too pay $100 for a taxi to the bay. But since he was no idiot, he asked to talk to the driver outside, grabbed him, and said, “i know tea kwon-do would you like to die here, or will you lower the price?” so reluctantly, the taxi driver lowered it to $50, and Dr. Kim set off for some other country to serve as a missionary, later he came to Holland, MI to start a church. Pastor henry on the other hand had moved to america for a better house, and also managed to reap the benefits of a better life. Pastor Henry’s largest barrier was language, things were also very different from the Netherlands, sports and school had nothing to do with each other, which on the other hand.. we americans made sure that sports had everything to do with school, college, high school, middle school, thats how it still is for us.
But why does any of this matter? Will these stories just lose themselves in our minds? Nah, I’ll hold onto these thank you very much, these are things I treasure, things that help me connect to people around me, and in a weird way, experience a thing that I really didn’t experience. Even better for me, I love different cultures, and immigration day was no exception. I definitely recommend something of this sort to anybody. It was a real pleasure.
Now to prove how exactly these moments really do matter. Imagine that there a person of different ethnicity sitting next to you, and what you don’t know is that they’re dying to speak, and their also feeling as if speaking would be their death, get ’em to tell a story! The things they’ve been storing up inside might just coming flowing out of them like floodgates being opened, and that might be what they need! I sure hope you travel internationally, and when you do, no better way to prepare by hearing immigrants stories, to make you excited, make you be ready for crazy changes, or maybe just some pre flight entertainment! I think that to fully live life you need to do this! Duh! Everyone loves a story! So help yourself to a fuller life.
