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The enormous
tragedy and chaos televised daily from the borders of Kosovo this
past month has overwhelmed me at times. Worse, is the realization
that we are not seeing the multiplied horrors occurring inside
those borders.
This is not the first time we have seen this kind of thing. In the past 20 some years, there have been other Kosovos -- Uganda, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Liberia, Somalia, Rwanda, Burundi, Congo -- with comparable human devastation. The latter were seemingly further removed from us, as they were not reported as extensively or instantaneously as the Kosovo situation. An international map published recently identifies 46 locations of current major conflict or high tension around the world* At first this surprised me. My perception has been that these conflicts seem to be packaged and presented to us one at a time. Possibly it is all the media people can do to cover one spot at a time. Or maybe they feel that is about all we can take. The suffering, pain, loss and grief that are presently occurring and has occurred in our time around the world are incomprehensible.
What can we do? We can pray. We can give to credible relief efforts (be careful who/where you send your money). A few individuals are able to physically go to the suffering and personally help. But nothing it seems is enough. The sum of our actions fails to counteract the tension we feel at the endless saga of pain we witness with each evening's news report and the weekly magazines and the daily newspapers we carry in from our mailboxes and stack in our basements.
So if there is not an ending or a healing of the pain, can we find any meaning in it? This is possibly the most difficult question to answer from a Christian point of view, and one of the biggest problems many people have with the Christian faith. I am not going to try to give the answer here, but only a thought: the Apostle Paul publicly stated to the Athenians of his day (quoted above), that God has ". . . determined the appointed times and boundaries of the nations, that they should seek God . . ." I believe God disrupts people's personal lives, even on a national scale, in order that they might seek him in their disillusionment, lostness and pain. This dynamic repeatedly played out in Israel's history as recorded in the Bible. That probably was one of the Apostle's reference points for his Acts statement, which he saw as applicable to all peoples and nations. This doesn't explain the pain away, but it can help us understand it. When people suffer, God is not absent. He is there. And he is calling people to Himself.
-- Steve Wilson, Pastor
*Christian Science Monitor, 2/12/99