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Several years ago my family found ourselves preparing a bedroom in our home for a young boy to stay. He had experienced the trauma of fleeing his country as a refugee and on top of that had witnessed a brutal incident that had left his father in prison and his mother in hospital. I waited for him to arrive with his social worker with some trepidation. Then he bounced into our house with a broad smile across his face, insisting on teaching me all the words - and moves - to his favourite top ten hits. It was not what I was expecting at all. That day I learned that refugee children are first and foremost children just like our own in need of safe and loving homes where they can be themselves. Right now 60 British children are trapped in Syria. Investigators from Save the Children discovered them yesterday - double the number they had been expecting to find. The child refugees, many under the age of five, are mostly living in the Roj and al-Hawl displacement camps. It is welcome news that the UK government is making plans to help repatriate them. Our government is good at repatriation. A couple of weeks ago 140 000 British nationals were successfully repatriated through Operation Matterhorn. Nearly 800 flights involving 140 aircraft were organised, many of them within 48 hours or timed to enable people to complete their Thomas Cook vacation. It is obviously a different matter rescuing tourists on holiday from those living in war torn countries. This is why British nationals Amira, Heba and Hamza, are still waiting for repatriation in Raqqa Syria with 24 other rescued orphans, after their mother and father were killed during a Turkish bombing. Sometimes the complexities of war and the global politics of immigration can make it hard to act as quickly as we would like. The fact that these children were born to ISIS fighters who left the UK to wage Jihad has also provoked strong debate. I can understand some of that too. Whenever social services ask me to take in a child from a family where harm has been done, I hesitate too. Sometimes it is harder to welcome the victim than it should be. According to the Bible, Christians are expected to treat anyone in need of a welcome as if they were God himself turning up in disguise. This tradition goes back as far as Abraham offering hospitality to three strangers who turn out to be God himself. The scene is powerfully presented in the Russian painter Andrei Rublev’s most famous work called ‘Trinity’. This theme of hospitality runs as a golden thread throughout the entire Bible with Jesus himself famously saying: “I was a stranger and you welcomed me in… whatever you did for the least of these you did for me.” “Whatever the circumstances and the complexities, it’s important not to lose sight of the real lives caught up in the middle. Every child deserves somewhere where they are welcomed, kept safe and helped to thrive.”