On a hot afternoon in southern Mexico, two thousand miles from home and in a fenced-in courtyard full of kids, I stood next to two young girls, listening as they told a story I found difficult to comprehend. It isn’t like me to be speechless. It isn’t like me to retreat. But my head started spinning and my confident countenance shifted into an unsettling fog.
I needed a moment, somewhere out of sight and away from the conversation.
Smiling, I excused myself from the group. Wandering down a cement hallway, I pushed open the first door I saw and slipped inside an old storage room.
Alone inside that musty, stuffy closet, I broke down.
I buried my face in my hands, and my body doubled over as I gave in to uncontrollable sobs. I cried and cried as these words raced through my head: How could I have missed this?
The Invitation I Didn’t See Coming
My personal passions and career paths have always revolved around pro-life advocacy. But when we adopted our second child, I stepped back from my much-loved role as director of sanctity of human life at Focus on the Family to make space for my own family. That’s when I received an interesting invitation. America’s newsfeeds were (and always seem to be) full of stories of “migrant caravans,” “invasions at the border,” and “unaccompanied minors,” so World Relief—a global Christian humanitarian organization I had partnered with in the past—was taking an immersion trip to Oaxaca, Mexico. They would listen to local city and church leaders talk about the realities of immigration, explore the cultural dynamics of the region, and visit shelters housing families and unaccompanied migrant children.
This was back in 2017, when the rhetoric around immigration and asylum seekers was intense. The plight and care of refugees—a topic conservative Christians had passionately advocated for and acted on for decades—was becoming “too political.” My evangelical community started distancing them- selves from this once-uncontroversial people group. You may remember fiery rhetoric about the border wall, increased security spending, ending DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), and outlawing sanctuary cities. I scrolled through my long list of friends and colleagues thinking, “Who wants to get into all of this?”
For me, being a Christian and being pro-life have always gone hand in hand. As I understood it, the sanctity and dignity of every human life weren’t in question; they were a banner under which all followers of Jesus fell in line. I had grown up in the church as a happily devoted pastor’s kid, learning about God’s love and compassion long before I could articulate such things. Like many in the evangelical culture, I only heard pro-life defined in the traditional sense, as “against the practice of abortion.” But as an adult, I started working professionally in pro-life spaces and was mentored into an expanded definition that took my pro-life commitments beyond the preborn and adoption space.
As a lifelong Christian, I thought this expanded definition made perfect sense. In my advocacy work, I leaned hard into a holistic definition of what it meant to be pro-life, creating resources and content to help others speak up for preborn children as well as other vulnerable populations across the full spectrum of life. After decades of searching for my calling, I had found it. This holistic pro-life definition and approach lodged in my soul. Recognizing vulnerable people became my passion. Inspiring and equipping the church to move closer to them became my purpose. Being holistically pro-life challenged me, fed my desire to keep learning, and pulled me into fascinating statistics and stories from around the globe. My curiosity about other people, their work, their lives, and their viewpoints only increased as I learned. I could feel my world growing bigger—my world and my faith. While some friends and family suggested I was moving too far away from my home base, I never felt an urge to leave the conservative Christian theological ballpark, so to speak. I simply wanted to start running all the bases. I felt called to inspire the church to genuinely and tangibly recognize the imago Dei, the image of God, in every person.
In all this I thought my definition of pro-life was robust and deep. In reality, I had just been skimming the surface. Eager to kick up some dust in my own heart and run full speed into what God had next, I agreed. I spent weeks mentally preparing myself, knowing full well it would be an emotionally hard trip. But no amount of prep work could have prepared me for the seismic shift God was about to make in my heart. I would not come home the same.
Four Days in Mexico
For four days our guides walked us through the streets of Oaxaca, Mexico. The weather was dry and hot, but the culture and landscapes enamored us as we moved from one educational experience to the next. We sat with government officials and nonprofits, with pastors and shelter directors, learning about regional migration and US immigration dynamics from their perspective.
One afternoon we toured a shelter for unaccompanied migrant children. The center was government-run, set up to care for children from southern parts of the continent who were lost, deserted, or separated from their parents during the journey north. As we neared the shelter, our guide prepped us with initial information. As we pulled up to the building, soberness hung in the air as we peered out the windows. My mind was swimming with questions—and, if I’m honest, with anger and judgment too.
What sort of person leaves their child behind? What kind of mother could do such a thing?
I couldn’t help but think of my own babies at home. I could never, ever abandon my children to seek a better life for myself. I don’t even let my children cross the street without their hands in mine, much less cross a country or a continent on their own. As we shuffled through security, children of all ages came into view. We were encouraged to greet and play with them for a while, then took a short tour of the center. That’s how I met Maria and Alicia.1 Maria, thirteen years old, walked toward us with an eight-month-old baby on her hip. Alicia was a babe herself, at eleven years old, yet she too carried a baby in her arms, a newborn only eight days old.
My friend Heather and I smiled at the two young girls, so close to the ages of our own children back home. We told them they were beautiful, as were the babies they carried. We asked what country they were from and whose babies they were watching. Since we didn’t speak their language, we held their gaze and our smiles as the shelter staff and translator explained what neither Heather nor I were prepared to hear: Maria and Alicia were neither babysitters nor big sisters: they were the mamas.
These kids were mothers? I was utterly undone. I immediately started thinking about my own daughter back home.
What if this were her life? These girls, these babies who had had just given birth, were nursing infants without their own mothers to teach or protect them. One thing was clear: no child chooses this, to be a mother at age eleven or thirteen.
My body froze while my mind started spinning, trying to find a slot, a file folder of experience or context that could help me make sense of it all. Nothing fit. Nothing was adequate to make sense of this horror that had happened to them. I became increasingly, desperately curious to understand why these girls were in this situation: preteen mothers, separated from their own mothers, in a government-run shelter far from their homes and families. I began to ask questions, more and more questions. And I started to question myself too. Why had I not been aware of these situations before?
Excerpted from Start With Welcome: by Bri Stensrud. Copyright 2024. Published by Zondervan Reflective. Used by permission. Zondervan.com