A Grand Tapestry

Your driving along and pull up to a stop light at a busy intersection. Across the street from you on the corner, is a man and his wife holding a sign. Beside them two young boys and in their aged mini-van is a sweet little girl. The sign says, "Trying to get home. God Bless" They are all clean, well kept, and seemingly healthy. They appear frantic in their attempts to get help. Lastly, they are obviously foreign, possibly middle eastern. (But, you don't know for sure!) What do you do? What should you do?
For a moment, as the light begins to change to green, you think, "Just drive!" Then, something inside you says, "STOP AND LISTEN!" As clear as the person in your passenger seat uttering, "I knew you were gonna stop." Followed by, "What are you gonna do? They are obviously middle-eastern." Then you realize you have pulled up to them. You find yourself, almost out of an outward compulsion, walking up to them. What will you say? What should you say?
Then you witness a woman yelling from her van in the intersection at these people. She is screaming hateful things and professing in the same breathe to pray for their souls as she scolds them for having been at another intersection just one day prior in the next town over. What are you to think? What can you think? How should you responds to this? Should you?
The husband walks over to you and in fairly decent English, (better than that of the woman yelling at them), and with and obvious accent, he explains their situation. They are Romanian! They have traveled to the mid-west in search of a better life after living with this large family in a studio apartment in California for several years, here on a work visa. After 3 weeks of not being able to find steady work and living out of suitcases and motels they are just trying to get back to California where they at least know someone, and have some kind of normal.
Now, what is your next step?
I won't go into that! I will leave that for you to decide for yourself! What I can tell you is this... The take away for me is that no one in the past 3 weeks has even stopped long enough to listen to this family's story. If they had, they would have found out that they are Orthodox Christians who were suffering in Romania and came to America (the legal way) to find a better life. They were prideful people who did not desire to sit on a street corner but had no other choice. They were Christians desiring to find a home and a purpose. Desperate to return home because all they had received in "the Bible-belt" was ridicule and disregard.
It got me thinking. That voice inside that said, "Stop and Listen" was a lesson I needed to learn. TO often we dismiss people for any number of reasons. Internally we ignore the eternal and instead focus on the external. We look at someone and for whatever reason we separate people in our mind and many often become outcasts and marginalized, even unintentionally. This, is because, WE DON"T LISTEN!!!
If we would just STOP and LISTEN to the stories of those we come across we will find a beautiful tapestry that God has woven into the fabric of life. Even the ugliest of stories becomes a part of a grand masterpiece.