loving God in tragedy

A friend of mine emailed this little story a while ago. I wept when I first read it. It's about the devotion of Sudanese women to Jesus in the midst of horrible, unimaginable suffering:

Baroness Caroline Cox has been described as "the Mother Teresa of the war-torn poor."  A nurse, scientist, and deputy speaker of Britain's House of Lords, she has, to many of the world's helpless, become "love in action" in human form and a powerful voice on behalf of the forgotten.

When asked to relate both her worst moment and her best during all her journeys of mercy.  The worst was entering a Dinka village after Sudanese government-backed soldiers had left, laden with human loot.

The stench of death was overpowering.  More than a hundred corpses lay where they had been savagely butchered.  Men, women, children, even cattle, had been cut down or herded into captivity to be carried north as slaves.  Straw huts were ablaze, crops had been razed, and devastation and death confronted the eyes everywhere.  Worst of all was the knowledge that the militia would return with their gunships and rifles, and the area's villages would once again lie naked before the ferocity and bloodlust of the Muslim fundamentalists form the North. "Genocide is an overworked word," Lady Cox said, "and one I never use without meaning it.  But I mean it."

And her best moment?  It came, she said, right after the worst.  With the raiders gone and the results of their cruelty all around, the few women still alive - husbands slain, children kidnapped into slavery, homes ruined, and they themselves brutally raped - were pulling themselves together.  Their first instinctive act was to make tiny crosses out of sticks lying on the ground and to push them into the earth.

What were they doing?  Fashioning instant memorials to those they had lost?  No, Lady Cox explained. The crudely formed crosses were not grave markers, but symbols.  The rossed sticks, pressed into the ground at the moment when their bodies reeled and their hearts bled, were acts of faith.  As followers of Jesus of Nazareth in the Horn of Africa, they served a God whom they believed knew pain as they knew pain.  Blinded by pain and grief themselves, horribly aware that the world would neither know nor care about their plight, they still staked their lives on the conviction that there was one who knew and cared.  They were not alone.