In the summer of 2011, God introduced me to “the nations,” as we like to call them. I attended a summer ministry training in Colorado, where I met a lot of young people from Turkey. That was all it took. I’d never had friends from another country before, and I was smitten. It changed the orientation of my heart and the trajectory of my life. God loves the nations, so I do too.

Today I serve in Toledo, Ohio, with Reliant, where I live in a house with a few other guys around my age. Toledo is home to a sizable immigrant community, including an increasing number of Syrian refugees. Focused on the international students on the campus, I gave little attention to the growing international community elsewhere in the city. I had my own thing going. But then God resettled a young man from Syria, named Mohammed, right into our home.

Initially it felt like a strange thing. There’s suddenly a young man from Syria living in our house who doesn’t speak a word of English. With a little help from Arabic-speaking students I know and a lot from Google, we were able to learn his story.

God loves the nations, so I do too.

His family had fled Syria in 2011 when the the civil war there began, leaving behind their home, a small olive farm, and their neighbors — all of whom are their relatives. They’ve lived in Jordan as refugees ever since. The UN resettled Mohammed in Toledo without his parents and four siblings. They don’t typically break up families like that. We’re told it was a clerical error.

In his 22 years of life, he had never been away from them before. Ever. Now he’d managed to find himself 6,000 miles away on a different continent with only a suitcase to his name in a house with strangers who speak a different language. And on top of that, he is his family’s sole financial provider. He has to find a job ASAP and wire money back to them.

When the UN told him that he had been granted permission to be relocated to the U.S. without his family, he had the option to decline and stay with them. But he chose to come here for the opportunity. That’s what our country is known for: opportunity.

I’m grateful that our country gave me the opportunity to know Mohammed. Our home is happier and friendlier because he’s with us. The warmth of his culture and his person, specifically, infect the house. He’s funny, generous, and loyal. He’s the most courageous person I know.

People ask me sometimes, “What does it feel like to live with a refugee?” And that’s a hard question for me to answer. Because it doesn’t feel like I live with a refugee. It feels like I live with my friend Mohammed.

Acts 17:26-27 says that God planned the times and places each person would live so that they might seek Him and find Him. The clerical error that brought Mohammed to our home was arranged by God so that he might seek and find God. I pray that my friend Mohammed finds in the United States all the opportunity he was looking for and one more that he didn’t know existed: the open door to abundant and eternal life in Jesus.