It’s Saturday morning: What should we do? For a family like mine, with young children, there are many options on a weekend. But one Saturday, we decided to try something different after a train whistle reminded us of what God calls us to do.

We live in Guadalajara, Mexico. The city captivates you with spring weather, various types of flowers year-round, and mariachi music in the streets. However, there is a less visited place there too, a fenced corridor that crosses the city, isolated from everyday life. It is the train tracks that migrants pass through on their way north to what they hope will be a better life.

A few days after we first arrived in Guadalajara, the media announced that thousands of people were coming from Central America and would cross the streets on their journey to the north. The city planned to turn Benito Juárez Coliseum into a shelter for five thousand people, with sleeping mats, space for cooking, and collection centres to receive donations from the community.

Convinced this was an opportunity for the church, we decided to get involved. My job was at the collection centre. We had lists ready for those who wanted to help; others arrived with their own ideas.

“I would like to bring food for the people who will arrive,” shared one young man, who was around thirty. I handed him the item list we were collecting. “I want to bring food ready to eat,” he insisted. I suggested he bring ready-made lunches, and two hours later he was back with bags full of food.

Soon people from Central America began to arrive. Some walked, others came on a flat trailer or trucks of all sizes. Groups of men, women, and children, all of them exhausted with sad faces. The lunches I passed out were grabbed and instantly gobbled up.

The migratory experience in Mexico has been going on for a long time; more than forty million nationals have made the journey to the United States to live there. Seeing someone passing through Mexico is an everyday occurrence. A more recent change is how they travel, in groups of thousands at a time. They are from various places, including Central America, South America, the Caribbean, and even Africa and Asia.

Why do people migrate? When we visit with the migrants along the train tracks, we listen to their stories, the reasons why people take such a dangerous journey. They talk about extreme poverty, violence against young people, and the lack of job opportunities in their countries. Their broken voices crush my heart. In that moment I wish they could travel in peace, or even feel compelled to return home instead of continuing this journey where they might perish.

As a father, I think about doing the impossible to ensure the well-being of my family. It is biblical—an angel once told Joseph, “Get up … take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt”(Matthew 2:13). So the little boy, Jesus, migrated with his family for their safety; the holy family was once an immigrant family in Egypt.

Author Luis Llosa writes, “We all come from a history of migration.” I have my own story. After studying in the United States, I moved to Canada to work as a pastor. My children were born there, and there I finished my postgraduate degree. This could be read as a success story.

I know other migrants who crossed the border on foot, who worked hard and prospered, but rarely shared their stories. Now that I’m in Mexico I realize there is an “untold story” about the journey, where the displaced suffer hunger, verbal abuse, robbery, rape, and even death.

Since my first encounter with the migrants in 2018, I have highlighted in the church the passages that evoke biblical migration: the exodus going to the promised land, the move to Babylon, and Jesus’ itinerant preaching throughout Palestine. These stories have motivated members to join our efforts in providing food, cleaning supplies, and clothing for the migrants.

My family is right there with them. Just recently, during Saturday morning breakfast, we heard the train whistle. Our eyes met, filled with compassion—we knew we must go to the train tracks. Quickly the kitchen turned into a work center; after making the lunches, we loaded them into the car. Saraí, my sixteen-year-old daughter, and Belén, fifteen, came with us carrying boxes with food and clothing.

We approached a group of people lying on the ground and found it was a family coming from Brazil. The young girls from the group began talking with our daughters. They were smiling, talking about fashion and music, the topics that young people talk about, right there in that isolated area of the city on the train tracks.

The girls’ mother told us, “We started our journey two months ago, but I just noticed that my daughters need this, to smile and talk with young people of the same age.”

We’ll keep going to the train tracks, spreading hope and love to those most vulnerable. What will you do when you next hear a train whistle?