During the summer at one of our Summit campuses, an Afghan woman—I’ll call her Hadiya—showed up to VBS and, with a very limited vocabulary, let the staff know she was there for her 5-year-old to attend the event. She opened up her phone and showed them a picture of a lady who she called Amanda and said that this lady invited her while she was at the park. Hadiya had wanted to come because she’d heard of the church before.
Meanwhile, a volunteer overheard this woman struggling through English and asked on a whim if she spoke Urdu. (Not everyone in Afghanistan speaks Urdu, so this was a shot in the dark.)
Turns out, Hadiya is a native Urdu speaker. And this member happens to be fluent in Urdu, too. So she got Hadiya’s name and helped her son get dropped off every day of VBS.
One night at VBS, Hadiya was walking with this member and saw another woman checking her kids in. Hadiya got really excited, went up, and hugged her. She then told our Urdu-speaking member that this lady was in line behind her at a thrift store a few months before. She had offered to pay for the pile of clothes Hadiya was buying for her kids.
Hadiya asked the question that had been on her mind since that day in the thrift store: “Why did you buy my clothes for me?” To which this member responded by explaining the gospel. God has been so gracious to me, and he expects me to respond by treating others the same way.
Hadiya said, “That actually sounds familiar. When I first moved to the United States as a refugee, some people helped me move in. They said the gospel was the reason they were helping, too.”
Turns out, that group of volunteers was also from The Summit Church.