Tuesday November 12
"The Joy of the Lord is my strength." Nehemiah 8:10
On Sunday we celebrated mass in an converted theater in Taichung with over 300 young men and women from the Philippines. These beautiful young people in their 20's and early thirty are working as migrant workers here in Taiwan. They come here to earn money to send home to support their wives, children, parents, grandparents.
Almost all of them work in factories making our phones, compasses, computer chips and a wide variety of other products which are exported around the world. Other migrants works in the care giving field taking care of the old, the young, the sick and the disabled. There are about 800,000 thousand migrants on the island. Most of them work 12 hour shifts and then do overtime for more money. Yet they have few rights for they are not citizens. They can spend 12 years in this country and then must return to their homeland. Once all the deductions are made from their paycheck they make only minimum wage and must pay their own room and board, and all living expenses so they have just a little to send back home to their families. And yet they still come here because even this type of work is better than they can get at home. Sound familiar? This is the story of almost every migrant who crosses the southern border of the USA.
And yet despite this hardship, that I could never withstand, the Sunday mass was a powerful sign of their Faith in Jesus Christ. Faith tested by the oppression they endure; faith that God has not abandoned them but is with them and will get them through each day and bring them to a better place. These young men and women, like Jesus Christ, himself, sacrifice themselves each day to make life better for those they have left behind in their homeland.
I wish I could bottle the joy in their faces, their spirits, their singing at mass and then ope that bottle everywhere I go to release its contents. The joy of the Lord is their strength and it is ours.
I had the privilege to serve as deacon at this Sunday mass and after the celebration was greeted by almost every one of these young men and women who just wanted to express their thanks and to ask for a blessing. I did give them a blessing in response but none of them knew that, in reality, they blessed me so abundantly that I will never forget them nor the life-giving spirit they freely shared with me.
