THE LORDS DAY IN SOUTH WEST MINNESOTA

THE LORDS DAY IN SOUTHWESTERN MINNESOTA

It was the Lord’s Day, and I confess, I was working.

Not in the fields or behind a desk, but sweeping up plaster dust after the workmen had gone. They’re helping to refurbish an apartment that was last remodeled sometime back when people still said “turn of the century” and meant the previous one.

Then a spark went off in my mind: a past renter was having an open house that afternoon, and we’d been invited.

I looked down at my blue jeans, dusty and speckled with plaster, and thought I looked a bit like a chimney sweep who’d lost his brush. But friendship matters more than fashion, so I called my bride and we set off—six blocks, which in our town counts as a journey.

It was a trip to honor a family who’d rented from us for a few years—good people from Myanmar, which we once called Burma. While they were with us, they had their first child, and now another is on the way.

I can’t quite explain the joy I find in these friendships with people from such faraway places. They arrive here and somehow make the place richer—not just with their labor but with their laughter, their cooking, their determination.

Dear Reader, I must hurry along, because that open house isn’t going to last forever.

When we arrived, we recognized the home because of the porch lined with two dozen pairs of shoes—every size, color, and condition. The door opened, and there stood our former renter, hands clasped in prayerful greeting, his face lit with a genuine smile that said more than words could manage.

We may look like an aging couple in a small Midwestern town whose demographics are changing, but I couldn’t be happier about it.

Inside, the home was brimming—overflowing, really—with people from every corner of the world: Kenya, Myanmar, Ethiopia, Sudan, Mexico, Nicaragua, Laos, Vietnam, and beyond. It felt a bit like National Geographic had come to life right there in the living room, with plates of food and the hum of ten different languages blending into one great human harmony. (really!)

I stood there, grateful. These families, these workers—many at the local meatpacking plant, some studying nights at the community college—they bring new life and purpose to our town. They are the pulse and promise of this place.

While we rest, they labor. While we sleep, they study. They reach, they climb, they take up the American project that some of us have grown too comfortable to carry.

The Statue of Liberty still calls, “Give me your tired, your poor,” and these folks answer—not with complaint but with action. They reinvent the dream daily.

To be an American, I’ve come to think, is to welcome the newcomers with open hands and open hearts—to make room at the table, to say, “We’re glad you’re here.”

Because they are. And we are better for it. Bill Keitel