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Monday, May 02, 2011

Osama, war, and things that matter.

This morning a friend skyped me that Osama was dead. Being morning and being pre-caffeinated, I mistakenly saw "Obama" and flipped out for about 15 seconds until I realized that he meant Osama bin Laden and that our president was indeed alive and well. I went onto facebook and it was everywhere. People love big news. It's like when Michael Jackson died and I got 15 text messages about it in the space of an hour. "Did you hear?! Can you believe it?!" We love delivering news, whether good news or just big news. People usually don't like having to tell people bad news... Who likes to see a broken heart and the rawness of uncontrollable emotions that come with the shock of receiving unexpected bad news? Ew. But we love news. Weirdly, it didn't move me at all. It made me wonder if we would finally leave Afghanistan, but I wasn't necessarily happy. Which for anyone else might be normal but five years ago, that would NOT have been my reaction. I just realized this about 30 minutes ago, that my non-reaction to the news is significant and shows something about me and how I actually have changed a lot since my pre-college days. Like, fundamentally changed.
Five years ago I was dead set on working for the CIA or FBI in counter terrorism intelligence. I was seriously debating doing ROTC in college and going the military route. It consumed tons of hours of my thoughts. I was so angry about 9/11, about the attacks in Spain, about the Russian school siege... Those people who inflicted that kind of pain on innocent people had to be stopped. And they simply deserved to be murdered. Taken out of this world. A tough job... Who wants to actually pull the trigger and take a life? But in my rationale back then, someone had to do it and that person would be actually saving the world. Saving it from brokenness, terrorism, preventing heart break and injustice. I was so passionate about justice. The justice of retaliation. "You kill my people and I will obliterate you and your people. Whoever innocent on your side that gets hurt, that collateral damage is your problem. It's worth the sacrifice. Whoever is not on our side is our enemy." Writing that now is so hard for me. It makes my bones hurt and my heart so sad for the time I spent so awfully mistaken. And now here I am, 5 years later, working with Mennonites in the largest Muslim country in the world.



I love it.



I love it how Jesus can change people and radically break down their ideas and re-direct their passions. I love that God has done that for me. I'm not sure when it was... and it doesn't matter, really. What matters is that along the way... Along the journey that has been life in the past 5 years, my passion and desire for justice has not wavered but my idea about what justice is has changed dramatically. Reading about the heart of Jesus and taking seriously his commands and taking a good look at his life and realizing that it was not flowing with my career goals. Not that I didn't care about religion and Jesus before... I remember feeling totally convinced in myself that it was completely alright in Gods eyes what I wanted to do in the future. Killing terrorists is acting out justice, and God is a God of justice! But, I remember freshman year in college when I started hearing some different views about justice and war from some of my hippy friends. I took a course called Urban Ministries and some of the stuff that Papa C (as we affectionately call my professor) said about justice started really challenging me and my ideas of fighting terrorism. The way he described the brokenness of the world and the things that really mattered. The deep brokennesses of the world that are harder to see but that cut deep. Racism, poverty, discrimination, lack of love, the prosperity of the church and its lack of brokenness for this aching world, our over crowded and neglected cities... I had a class called Current Events right before his class and it was all about BBC news and the back-story of all the crap that is going on in the world, and I remember a number of days where I just went back to my room after those classes and cried for all the brokenness and heaviness of the world. Later I took another class of his called Contemporary World Missions and I went through some legitimate injustices during a 3 day refugee simulation that left me very changed in my ideas about who exactly is facing injustice in the world. I remember beginning to think that there are bigger wars to be fighting than those in Afghanistan and Iraq, than the war against terrorism, and for the next couple of years in college I learned about those bigger wars. The war against human trafficking, the war against apathy, the war against our ignorance of the world, the war against discrimination and domestic abuse, the war against the breaking of families and the presence of neglected orphans, the war against aids and against unjust urbanization... The list goes on. I realized that there is so much more. And it's deeper than a hijacked plane. Acts of terror (as depicted by the media) are only a symptom of a more deep brokenness in the world. I don't want to be fighting symptoms my whole life.

Also during college I read Shane Clairborne's book the Irresistible Revolution and absolutely fell in love with the Kingdom of God and what it looks like to live for it. Real relationship that satisfies the deep loneliness we often feel, holistic views of Jesus' life and the Bible, radical justice that not only changed how I saw justice in the world but how I view God's grace to me. To handle justice with grace... They seem so opposite, really, but they aren't. And I've been learning that. I think the last straw was spending a semester in Egypt where I met Muslim people for the first time and realized how incredibly hospitable and diverse and alive the people of Egypt are. I met fully veiled women, I met women who wore veils that let some of their hair show, I met Muslim women who didn't even wear a veil, I met Coptic Christian women, I met Catholic nuns who worked in an orphanage that Mother Teresa started, I met Palestinians who had lost livelihoods because of the wall Israel built and who had their houses destroyed and their precious, ancient olive trees burned, I met Israelis who were terrified of suicide bombers and who were wanting their missing soldiers to come home from where the Palestinians were keeping them.... I met people and I heard stories and that changed everything. I met rabbis from the organization Rabbis for Human Rights that spoke about fighting for the rights of the Palestinians, I met Palestinian Christians who were heart broken for how Christians in the west were neglecting them in their unwavering support for Israel... These are people. From both sides. Whose lives are tangibly broken, because the world is broken. And we are broken. And killing one man who masterminded some awful, awful events is not going to change the brokenness of the world one bit. Celebrating death? Really? He's just a symptom of a deeper brokenness.
I read this facebook post today: "what honors the God within us more: celebrating the destruction of broken humanity, or mourning the brokenness? (thank you, Kara S.)"
It reminded me of why Osama's death didn't really lead me to celebrate. That's not the war I'm fighting anymore. It's not the justice I'm passionate about anymore.

Fighting brokenness starts with people. Working with people, individuals. I may eventually work in politics and policy, but for now I am finding wisdom and growth by working with individuals. Sharing in their brokenness by living with them, but at the same time fighting that brokenness either through providing shelter and food, breaking down stereotypes and correcting cultural misunderstandings, providing education (and being educated myself!) and health, advocating on their part, bringing awareness to discrimination and hate and encouraging an environment of non-violence and peace, getting mad and starting a campus org to raise awareness of and funds to fight human trafficking, or just loving on people and building relationships with them even though they are very different than me. I'm only currently doing some of the above mentioned things, and sometimes its easy to lose site of the larger battle and just run home to McDonalds and apple pie and American flags, but that's not where I'm supposed to be right now.

I'm here, in my own brokenness, trying to proactively live out what I would like the world to be. I would like the world to be a place that learns, a place where there is grace in the midst of tensions and misunderstandings, a place that is not afraid of uncomfortableness, a place that is not so ethnocentric and self focused. A place where we teach each other about those things we don’t understand, so that we can understand, and be better for it. A place that mourns for life lost, regardless of whose life it is. A place that understands grace and forgiveness and true justice.

A place that moves for things that matter

2 comments:

Charissa said...

thanks so much for your post. i really resonate with a lot of what you said...this year in Honduras I've been thinking SO much about what justice really means and what we want to happen when we cry for justice...but is it really a justice full of grace? or is it retribution we really crave?
well said...lots to chew on today...

trisha said...

thanks so much for your thoughts. i've been thinking a ton about what our reaction should be as Christians at this news. i found myself saying "aman" many times while reading this post.