Challenging Times

We are in the midst of the Israel-Lebanon War of 2006, and it's all I can do to turn on the news and hear the latest tale of woe. These are real people who are suffering and dying, most of them having no connection to the ideologies that have created this conflict. I could take sides, I suppose; we're all prone to taking sides because then we have our explanation - one side is right and the other is wrong, one is good and the other is evil.

But my reading of the Bible tells me that none of us are exempt from evil. Far deeper than Israel's determination to maintain its integrity as a nation or those who argue that Israel has disenfranchised them, we have the darker forces of power and intimidation and revenge and cruelty done with some kind of mistaken notion that the end justifies the means. No one is exempt.

A friend of mine who knows about such things believes that the tensions in the Middle East can never be resolved. They go too deep and have existed over too long a period of time. So, can nothing be done? Initiatives for a cease-fire are good, because no one is rational when children are dying. Maybe the sides can be brought into a forum where they can talk through the issues. But these are bandaids on cancer. They don't cure the disease, which is simple human depravity, something we all share.

The solution isn't simple, but it can work. Back in the early 1970s, the Biafran War of Nigeria killed thousands. Children starved and died. It was a war born of long-standing animosities and it only ended when it absolutely had to. There was a Christian denomination right in the midst of this horror - the Qua Iboe Church of Nigeria. Its members were on both sides of the conflict, and when the war was over they called a conference to determine if anything could be recovered of the unity this group of churches had once shared. When they met, there was no need for lengthy negotiation. They determined that there was no disunity, because they were one in Jesus Christ, no matter what horrors had sought to disrupt them. They embraced as brothers and sisters.

We have a unity as human beings in that we are all the creation of God. We have a unity in that we have all rejected God's plan for us and fallen into a misbegotten independence that is at the heart of all evil, all conflict. And the only answer to the turmoil that is modern life is for each of us to embrace the forgiveness won for us by Jesus Christ on the cross and to receive the risen Jesus as our Lord and Master. In that reality lies our only hope.