Once We Were Strangers: What Friendship with a Syrian Refugee Taught Me about Loving My Neighbor | Love Quotes

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Friendship is such a strange, unexpected thing. It can creep up on you when you least expect it, from the least likely places. I never could have imagined I’d become friends with a Syrian man from 6,000 miles away, a Muslim man whose children call him Abba. In the last year, Mohammad has changed my life in ways difficult to explain or describe. The coffee, the drives to Philadelphia, the chats on my front porch. There’s one thing I know for sure. If you insert me into the story of the good Samaritan, I’m not only the good Samaritan; I’m not only the one who stopped to help. I’m also the man lying along the side of the road, beaten down. I’m the one dying from selfishness and hypervigilance and fear. The role of the good Samaritan, in a role reversal I couldn’t have seen coming, has been taken on by Mohammad. Before I even knew him, he called me friend.
― Shawn Smucker,
Once We Were Strangers: What Friendship with a Syrian Refugee Taught Me about Loving My Neighbor

Friendship is such a strange, unexpected thing. It can creep up...

- 12th May 2020 0

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