There’s a bright blue plastic chair, flipped upside down and partially shattered, on the outside corner of the porch. Shards of plastic are scattered on the ground, along with jagged pieces of shrapnel from the bomb that landed about 30 meters away. Those jagged, molten chunks of metal traveled with such force and velocity that they punched holes in the brightly painted wall of the small bloc of offices, and ripped through the body of the man sitting in that chair. His blood still stains the porch. A few others who were caught in the unpredictable trajectory of those murderous fragments died of their injuries within hours, despite efforts to get them to a hospital. Nothing has been touched since that day, like an unadorned, but sacred, memorial. I took a few photos, which I cannot bring myself to post. To do so would seem blasphemous, obscene.
As we walked around the compound, to the opposite end of the building that was still perfect and undamaged, someone commented, “If only they’d been on this side they would have been safe.” If only. If only this senseless war would stop. If only people weren’t proud, petty and power-hungry. If only the human race didn’t have such a capacity for hard-heartedness, cruelty and domination. But it’s a broken, unreconciled world, and if you’re a follower of Jesus, you are called to live in it with hope, because you belong to another kingdom that operates on a different set of values. It’s a kingdom that will ultimately subsume every earthly, dysfunctional kingdom. A kingdom where mercy gets the upper hand and where the humble – instead of being shoved aside and trampled – will inherit the earth; a kingdom where those who mourn will receive eternal comfort and those who hunger for justice will finally be satisfied. Despite your own brokenness and the brokenness of those around you, you are called to live a reconciled life that reveals the truth of this eternal kingdom, and to invite others into it, to be reconciled to God and to one another.
Living in this world is risky. The trajectory of bomb shrapnel is unpredictable – as are so many other dangers and disasters, and risk is unavoidable even if you do your best to ‘play it safe.’ Something you can be sure of, however, in this wildly unstable world, are the words of Jesus and the incontrovertible principles of the Kingdom He announced. We need to take care to align ourselves, and then realign as often as necessary, with these words that will not pass away and with this Kingdom which is eternal. (I’m convinced that every follower of Christ should read the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapters 5 to 7 on a regular basis). In the short term, this is risky and will indeed put us at odds with the politics of power and cultural dominance, so remind yourself that political power and cultural dominance are sand castles destined to crumble.
Some might say that those whose lives were lost in that seemingly random bombing were simply ‘in the wrong place at the wrong time.’ I don’t agree. They were right where they were supposed to be, doing what they were supposed to be doing, serving a needy population of over 40,000 refugees (just a fraction of the many millions) displaced because of war, demonstrating mercy in the face of brutality. And yes, it is a tragedy that they are gone. But when I consider eternity, I’d rather be on the wrong side of a building when a bomb falls, than on the wrong side of history when the Son of Man comes. Jesus said, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away.” This, my friends, is the only solid ground on which to anchor your hope and build a life. It never hurts to check your foundation.
Know This Love 