The Long Highway Home

By Elizabeth Musser

Description:

When the Dr. pronounces "incurable cancer" and gives Bobbie Blake one year to live, she agrees to accompany her neice, Tracie, on a trip back to Austria, back to The Oasis, a ministry center for refugees that Bobbie helped start twenty years earlier. Back to where there are so many memories of love and loss. Bobbie and Tracie are moved by the plight of the refugees and in particular, the story of the Iranian Hamid, whose young daughter was caught with a New Testament in her possession back in Iran, causing Hamid to flee along the refugee Highway and putting the whole family in danger. Can a network of helpers bring the family to safety in time? And at what cost? Filled with action, danger, heartache and romance, The Long Highway Home is a hymn to freedom in life's darkest moments.

Book Takeaway:

One of the things that struck me from attending The Oasis was something each of us can learn. Do what you can. Offer a smile, a sack of clothes, a warm meal, a whisper of hope, a Bible. The Lord wasn’t asking me to solve the huge worldwide dilemna of refugees. But I felt that I could do something—and that ‘something’ was to write a story that tells a few of their stories. The Long Highway Home is fiction, but it is based on many, many stories of refugees finding hope in the midst of the horror as Jesus reveals Himself to them in the most surprising ways. And I wanted to tell the story of hard-working missionaries who are giving their very lives for these people.

Why the author wrote this book:

For the past few years, my husband and I have visited with missionaries who serve at a Christian welcome center for refugees called The Oasis. The Oasis is a five-minute-walk from the government refugee housing camp in the town of Traiskirchen, Austria.

As Paul and I got to visit our teams and see their work, our hearts were moved. I particularly felt drawn to The Oasis, where ITeams workers have a ministry to refugees outside Vienna. The Oasis is right down the street from the Government Housing Refugee Center, where thousands of refugees come through each year.

The Oasis offers a clothing room, coffee bar, special evenings for men and women, the possibility of watching The Jesus film in the refugees’ own languages, Bible studies and much more.

When I visited The Oasis, all of my prejudices and fears having to do with refugees changed. Here were grown men coloring pictures, playing Uno, smiling because a missionary was offering coffee and a kind word. And I heard a few of the refugees’ stories of flight, of terror and of finding Jesus.


The stories I heard of refugees coming to faith in Jesus Christ as they learned of Him at The Oasis inspired my novel The Long Highway Home