“For I was hungry, and you gave Me food; I was thirsty, and you gave Me drink; I was a stranger, and you welcomed Me,” says our Lord in Matthew 25:35-36 (ESV). Words that are 2,000 years old—yet with laser precision apply to our time and place in the 21st century. In Sunday School at Kaiserslautern Evangelical Lutheran Church recently, one of our members—we will call her Suzie—shared her experience serving some of the over 30,000 Afghan evacuees who have arrived at Ramstein Air Force Base in the past month. Even though they are a U.S. military family stationed in the Kaiserslautern Military Community, she had until recently not been personally involved in Operation Allies Refuge. But something deep inside of her kept telling her to get involved–to give food to the hungry, to give drink to the thirsty, and to welcome the stranger. As she explained, she heeded that “voice” and volunteered with the local Red Cross to serve the evacuees as help was needed. Yet, she wanted to do more. So, she got on social media and asked her online friends whether they would chip in so she might be able to—on her own—purchase additional items that she thought might be needed. She did not expect anything to come of her request. Yet within three days, generous friends had donated so much money to her cause that Suzie was able to purchase entire trunk loads of shower shoes, Pedialyte, and baby bottles–even before she realized these were precisely the items the Red Cross and the USAF were requiring. Weeks into this effort, Suzie felt that the Lord was equipping her with supernatural powers to keep serving the people in need, even though she was already personally spent to the point of exhaustion. “Why am I doing this?” she kept on asking herself. “I don’t know these people, there are thousands of other helpers here, and I don’t even know what size shower shoes they wear!” And then it dawned on her: All her doubts were completely irrelevant because our Lord *commands* us to give food to the hungry, to give drink to the thirsty, and to welcome the stranger. For when we are serving those in need, we are also serving *Him*.
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