This piece was originally published in the Mercy issue of The Mockingbird, which mailed ahead of the start of the current Israel-Hamas war.
You’re not alone if you avoid the news before your morning cup of coffee — recent years have brought particularly heartbreaking headlines. In Ukraine, we’ve seen a war that’s caused the largest and fastest displacement crisis in Europe since World War II; in Afghanistan, a government takeover that’s set back women’s rights at least 20 years; in Syria, a devastating earthquake where twelve years of conflict has already decimated its healthcare system and sent 15 million people spiraling into humanitarian need; and a cost-of-living crisis echoed worldwide. I know all this not so much because I keep up with the news on the regular, but because I read and write stories of refugees and displaced people whom my colleagues from the International Rescue Committee work with every day.
When I first joined the IRC, I was having nightmares about crowds of people attempting to escape Afghanistan. Several months later, when the conflict in Ukraine escalated, the nightmares began again. I struggled as our team collected and produced so many stories of people who, even still, haven’t been helped. New mothers fleeing the country with newborns were forced to leave their husbands behind. Families were separated. People were at a loss for what to do or where to go. I remember one particular night I woke up to an intense thunderstorm thinking that DC, where I live, was being bombed.
I realized that war, earthquakes, droughts, and famine show no mercy to whoever is in their wake. They spare no one. And this is what regurgitates some of my toughest life questions: Where is God in the midst of the war in Ukraine? Or the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan? Or the 7.8 magnitude earthquake that struck Turkey and neighboring countries while families were still asleep in their beds?
This is what led me to the stories you’re about to read. In an attempt to expand my own understanding of God’s mercy in the midst of these horrific tragedies, I interviewed several of my colleagues at the IRC — a humanitarian organization that helps people affected by some of the world’s worst crises to survive, recover, and rebuild their lives.
All of them have either been face-to-face with these tragedies or have had to deal with the fast and hard facts on the other end of them. What I learned is that my colleagues have been chewing on these questions enough to come up with some pretty thought-provoking answers.
And, somehow, they all turned out to be unanimous.
Helper Number One: Elias Abu Ata
A lot can happen in 90 seconds. Recently, in Turkey and neighboring countries, it took 90 seconds for families to lose their homes, their entire belongings, and — for many — their loved ones.
The 7.8 magnitude earthquake that struck in the early morning of Monday, February 6, killed 50,000 people, injured more than 120,000, and destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes. For Syria, this was all happening on top of a 12-year armed conflict that’s already displaced more than 12 million people, some as many as 20 times.
When Elias Abu Ata, the IRC’s regional senior communications and media manager in the Middle East and North Africa, went to the region to cover the stories of families affected, he found them to be some of the most challenging he’s faced. “You try to put yourself in their shoes and to imagine that you’re waking up at 4:00 in the morning — and obviously you’re in your sleepwear, you’re in your bed — and suddenly you feel like the whole world is shaking,” Elias said. “It’s not just the earth, not just the ground. Everything is shaking. And that’s what our staff told me when I spoke with them. They said it really felt like doomsday. It was Judgment Day. We’ve never experienced anything like this.”
The region felt more than 13,000 aftershocks. Elias remembers his own experience of a few of them, one being a 6.2 magnitude aftershock. “I do remember quite vividly that that night, I did not sleep well,” Elias said. “I kept waking up. My heart was beating fast the whole night — I was just on edge waiting for something to happen so I could run with my backpack and get out of that building…. Once I experienced that myself, I could begin to imagine what it was like for those people who actually lived those first 90 seconds.”
Elias had the privilege of time to think about what to pack. Most did not. Instead, they had only a small window during which to grab their children, ensure their spouse or their parents were with them, and find safer ground. There was no time, nor desire, to think about the cash and civil documents they would need in the future. Families then moved into tents and stayed there, either because their homes were completely destroyed or they were too terrified to go back inside.
I asked Elias what, if anything, gives him hope when he witnesses these tragic events firsthand. He gave the same response as everyone else you’ll meet in these pages. First, God. And second, the people.
“For me as a Christian, I can obviously go back to my faith,” he said. “Mercy is constantly associated with God and with Jesus. And if there’s love, there’s mercy. But obviously, people who are caught up in a conflict, whether it’s an armed conflict or a natural disaster, there’s no mercy falling on them. But I think humanitarians can be an act of mercy for these people. In my work, I’m able to witness the impact of the IRC on the ground in terms of the assistance that we’ve provided within the first 48 hours.”
Not only is Elias inspired by watching humanitarians deliver aid, lifesaving medical care, and psychosocial support for families to recover from trauma, but also by seeing the resilience and hope in the people affected. A family in Northern Syria particularly inspired him. In 90 seconds, their home was reduced to rubble. After that, anything that shook triggered the same trauma, as if the world never had stopped shaking. Yet a few weeks later, they still prepared to observe Ramadan, a month to reflect, fast, and worship together.
“Just to see them a few weeks later, now as they prepare for Ramadan, to see the resilience, to see them hopeful for their child while living in a tent — which is not ideal after you’ve been living in a relatively decent home — you can clearly see that there is still hope in these people and they’re able to stand up and continue. You’re seeing the devastation, but then you can still see they’re able to smile and say, Happy Ramadan. That’s another reason for me to continue what I do and to have hope. They’ve seen so much devastation, yet they still manage to smile. They still manage to hold onto their hope for a better future.”
Helper Number Two: Derek Lee
Derek is a numbers guy. He looks at humanitarian programs and assesses what’s working, and what’s not. But in his work he’s discovered how his computer screen can easily become a shield from the world’s biggest problems. Responding to crisis after crisis without any sign of slowing down starts to get repetitive. He also found himself struggling with the theology and prayers he’s heard in church.
“If you’re in humanitarian work long enough,” he told me, “you start to question a lot of American theology: things like, ‘You have to trust that you’re going to get your daily bread,’ because having been abroad long enough, I know people who ended up not getting their daily bread and then starving to death. And I can even see from behind my computer screen that if we aren’t treating 100 kids in a certain place, then we know statistically 20 of those kids will die. We know that’s a reality in places that we’re not working in, which is why we’re trying to work in those places. And so the theology of ‘God will always provide’ is not necessarily there. And that was hard for me to confront. But the part of what strengthened me, and why I do the work that I do, is understanding that Jesus also laments. While I can’t understand why certain tragedies happen, I can still trust that as much as I am feeling the tragedy and the pain of it, Jesus feels it all the more.”
Throughout his career, Derek has worked for several humanitarian organizations, and he still struggles with the heavy things he witnessed. But after spending several years on what we would typically define as the “frontlines,” Derek decided it was time to redefine frontline work when he asked himself what it would look like to participate in God’s redemptive work if he was called to do something less glorious, yet still necessary?
For Derek, that answer became an Excel spreadsheet.
Being who he is, he loves when the numbers fit together — maybe even too much at times. “There’s the other part of it that is almost dehumanizing on my spreadsheet. If I’m putting in like 6,000 or 8,000 or something, it’s easy to get lost in the equation of it and not realize that this is also kind of also playing with people’s lives.”
What helped Derek humanize these numbers was his time spent at Fort McCoy in Wisconsin in 2021 as a part of the IRC’s Afghanistan response. When he got there, the work he initially expected to do was very different from the work he had to do, and it was far more critical.
“Instead of filling out forms or something, I ended up leading a team that was checking all of the people who were going through the pipeline. We would be checking and finding so many errors a day. It was crazy. Ten minutes of Excel would immediately change someone’s life for the better or for the worse. Because we’d be like, ‘Oh, this person should not be going to Alaska because they’re 80-years-old and only have one leg — they should maybe go here, where they have a family member and might be a lot better off.’ It was important to work with names instead of just numbers.”
This is why lament has become so important to Derek. Lament is not just a cry of pain. It can also be a spiritual practice, a tool to make sure we’re grounded in reality. Without it, the numbers on Derek’s computer screen become lifeless numerals again.
He told me, “The passage that grounds that emotion of lament is when Jesus heals Lazarus…. This is where that famous shortest verse comes in, where it says, ‘Jesus wept.’ And then the verse after that says the community looked at Jesus crying and said, ‘Look how much he loved.’ Then Jesus heals Lazarus. But Jesus goes to this town where Lazarus is dead already knowing that he’s going to heal Lazarus because he’s God. He knows what he’s about to do, but he weeps anyway. That’s been my grounding verse in the work that we do — that we can take time to cry even when we know good things will happen. We know that we’re going to go into this town to treat kids for malnutrition, with an almost 99 percent success rate. But lament is part of caring for the community. In the Lazarus story, what changed onlookers’ lives, as much as seeing someone raised from the dead, was seeing Jesus weep. I think that compassion is what is longer lasting.”
Helper Number Three: Vera Leung
When the world moves on while people continue to suffer in the wake of disaster, it’s heartbreaking. This is what Vera Leung, a creative director who’s worked in the humanitarian space for more than 10 years, has had to battle against. It’s her job to sit with people’s hard stories and then try to make other people care when their attention is constantly being pulled away.
“We’re trying to call attention to these stories,” Vera said. “I think about how long there’s been famine or drought in East Africa, like years of that, and the world still moves on very quickly, but there are still human beings feeling the impact of this over years. Same with the war in Ukraine and same with Afghanistan. People in Afghanistan are having to adjust the way in which they live, yet the world moves on constantly from these big topics.”
When Vera visited a refugee camp in Kenya in 2022 and spoke with refugees who’ve spent their entire lives there, she questioned for the first time if there may not even be a solution. “These are settlements where people have spent a lifetime, where they were born and raised their own families,” she said. “I just viscerally was like, Oh, is this ever going to shift or change? And what is the solution here? I couldn’t fully see the end there. And I had to wrestle with, am I okay with not seeing the end and does that shift or change how I engage in the present? What if what we’re called to do is to imagine just today and tomorrow? It’s not necessarily hope deferred or hopelessness. It’s hope in the moment.”
What’s giving Vera hope right now are the inspiring words from one of America’s most beloved figures from our childhoods: “There is always somebody who’s willing to show up. It’s like that Fred Rogers quote about looking for the helpers. When we look for the helpers, they’re truly always there, in either really small ways or big ways. And I feel like that can also mean looking inwards. Where am I? When can I be the helper? You’re never truly alone in anything.”
For Vera, these helpers are closely tied to how she sees God working in the midst of some of the world’s worst crises. “I see God at work in places that are very close to a crisis — in the ways the surrounding and immediate community is deployed, how they show up to look for survivors, or to bring supplies or things that are needed. People who open up their homes, who make sure people feel safe where they are. In that situation, community is everybody from your neighbors, to local organizations, to emergency response units. All of these people are showing up in that moment to physically ensure their neighbors are safe and supported. I also see God showing up in the miraculous ways that people survive these crises. I feel like, in the same way that a crisis can seem like ‘an act of God,’ the survival of people through it is also an act of God.”
Helper Number Four: Brianna Rapp
From serving exploited women in the Philippines to sitting with young boys once enslaved in Ghana’s fishing industry on Lake Volta, Brianna Rapp has seen a lot in her career as a producer, photographer, and missionary for several different humanitarian organizations. For Brianna, mercy and justice work hand in hand. You can’t have peace without justice. And you can’t have mercy without relief.
“I see mercy as relieving people of their circumstances,” Brianna said. “Even thinking more in terms of sin, God relieves people and loosens up the grip of sin on us even though we don’t deserve it. I think God is really kind to partner with his people and I even feel like I see his mercy in letting us be vessels of that mercy. Getting to see all my colleagues that I’ve worked with across the world, seeing them work as counselors or first responders — ultimately that’s God’s relief coming through his people.”
Bri has especially seen this during her time in the Philippines. There she witnessed social workers spending their days advocating for young women and children who’d been exploited in the commercial sex trade. “When I think of the social workers I met, I realize their quality of life has been diminished, even just from the amount of time that they have to spend driving to work. They drive with their clients to the court — and getting there can take several hours — only to show up and then the judge tells them, ‘It’s my birthday. I’m not working today. You have to come back in three months.’ It’s tiring and it’s exhausting. Yet because this is the one client they’re advocating for, they’re not going to walk away. And the Lord’s like that with us, too. He’s not going to abandon us when things get hard.”
One of the things that has brought Bri the most hope is the relationships she’s built with survivors. One boy’s story still brings her to tears. When Gideon was rescued off of Lake Volta, he didn’t count his blessings and call it a day. Instead, he asked to go back to where he had been enslaved, because he couldn’t leave his friends behind.
“He wasn’t scared to go back into the darkness. He went back to where those perpetrators were to get his friends — he was not going to leave them behind. Seeing him continue to advocate for all of those enslaved — that’s what gives me hope. Those who’ve overcome what’s been against them, how God has lifted them out, and now they do the same for those who are still caught up in this darkness. You see that in so many stories, every day. And so that’s what gives me hope.”
So, next time you open your email bracing yourself for the next batch of scary news, like Fred Rogers says, “Look for the helpers.” Look for the women leading mobile health teams who are risking their lives to reach other women in Afghanistan with lifesaving healthcare they wouldn’t otherwise receive. Look for the people at Arizona State University who welcomed three young Afghan women to their campus after the Taliban closed all of Afghanistan’s campus doors to them. Look for the passionate dance instructor in a Ukrainian women’s center who is helping women heal from the trauma of war through movement and dance. Look for Elias Abu Ata. Vera Leung. Derek Lee. Brianna Rapp. Not only will you always find the helpers, but you will always find God’s mercy. Even in tragedy, it is there.