I’ve become accustomed to violence, used to seeing death.
Hatred is not just our new normal currency; it is our favourite. We now more quickly assimilate with others over our mutual agreement of who to be against, rather than who to be for. We love to hate ‘the other’.
We are at war.
Anger.
Fear.
Hatred.
Violence.
Grief…unending grief.
The cycle continues unchecked, unbroken, while the death toll keeps rising and rising.
“A voice is heard in Ramah,
lamentation and bitter weeping.
Rachel is weeping for her children;
she refuses to be comforted for her children,
because they are no more.”
Jeremiah 31:15 (ESV)
Rachel is the mother of the child buried under the rubble in Gaza;
the aunt of the boy dying of malnutrition in Yemen;
the father of the toddler taken in Nigeria;
the cousin of the soldier killed in Ukraine;
the brother of the girl murdered in Sudan;
the sister of the woman raped in the Congo;
the mother of the son killed in Israel;
the friend of the man imprisoned by Russia;
the father of the teenager buried in Iran;
the sibling of a child killed in Lebanon;
the friend of the girl lost in Myanmar.
Ramah is the world, and we are all Rachel.
There are currently over 130 active armed conflicts taking place across the world, and about 60 countries engaged in warfare or high-intensity violence. Over one third of the world is involved in conflict beyond their own borders, and the numbers of those either killed or injured in this fighting is overwhelming.
I think about the tragic impact which one lost life has on a family and community. It is felt deeply and personally by everyone who knows them, sometimes even reverberating across a whole city or nation. One life.
The fissures which are being created as a result of this global pandemic of violence is catastrophic. For those of us privileged enough to be removed from the frontlines of war, ingesting it from our devices, in the safety of our homes; we are not left unscarred. We are instead getting numb-er to the pain of people we’re not connected with, ever hardened in our narratives of which side is right, or who we believe to have the upper moral hand. Our algorithms are making us ‘experts’ on nations and people groups that we’ve had zero proximity to. We quickly dehumanise ‘the other’ in our desire to find someone to blame; a way to make sense of the atrocities taking place; a justification for the violence. Our theologies once again creating a license to kill.
Today I looked at my phone and took in multiple stories and images of death, dying, and violence within a few minutes. I found myself starting to cry, the grief hitting me in the silence of my home. The internal questions leaping up and tripping over each other in their desire to make sense of the enormity of all that is happening:
When will this end?
Where are you God?
Are we meant to be ok with these wars because some ‘bad guys’ get killed along the way?
How can we stop this?
What can we do?
Are you ok with all this God?
Where is our humanity?
Is all of this justified?
I don’t believe that God is ok with this. I refuse to believe that he has sanctioned the actions and words of violence which we see so much of right now. As I sat with the grief of what I know is taking place and yet feel powerless to do anything about, I was also reminded of the stories of hope and resilient joy that can be heard when you tune in to their frequency. Sometimes choosing to continue believing is resistance enough in the face of formidable odds.
I believe that God can be found in the rubble and the war torn buildings, in the refugee camps and the bomb shelters, with the weak, the traumatised and the vulnerable. He is not afraid to walk into the enemy’s camp and draw close to the ones we hate. He delights in doing so. I am convinced that the God of Abraham, Issac and Jacob is also the God of the Palestinian, the Arab, the Russian, the rebel, the settler, the oppressor, the far-right and the far-left, the racist and the bigot. Because he approves of every action they make and word they say? No. Because he loves humanity, and beneath every action and every hateful word spoken is a human. And while there is a heart that still beats within their chest there is someone whom love can heal and restore. Jesus literally bled for humanity. For all humanity. This is where hope can be found.
Maybe I’m naive to think this, to pen it down and commit to believing it. I think I would rather live in the potential naivety of hope and redemption though, than to allow my heart to harden and be infiltrated by the onslaught of hatred and violence.
In the words of ‘Life Boat’ by Raye:
'“I’m not giving up yet.”
So today I am challenged to find hope and continue hoping against hope, to remind my soul of who our God is and what he has called us to do: love.
It is beyond simple and also beyond hard. It is outrageous and it is truly the only thing that will change our world. When we lose our humanity, we lose our ability to love, and if we’ve lost our ability to love then all we are being fueled by is hate.
So may we, fellow humans, clothe ourselves in the garments of humanity today. May we put on love, for ourselves and for others, that we may be people who perpetuate love and hope instead of perpetrating violence and injustice. May we seek to see the humanity in someone different from us, and so help to build bridges of understanding over the chasms of discord. May we speak out our stories of hope so that others would be revived in their journey and choose to also not give up yet.
