i have been privileged to see the hand of the Lord in some of the most horrific situations on the planet. we took in a 16-year old girl who had been abducted by the LRA (a paramilitary band that sustains its activities of pillaging, rape, and slaughter by abducting children and using them as soldiers). she watched as her Congolese village was raided, her people were tortured, and her mother was hacked to death. her arms were damaged from the ropes used to tie her to a tree, and she was raped. her first day on the compound, another missionary and i walked over to the house she is living in to meet her. we introduced ourselves, shook her hand, walked outside, and both started crying. she had the most forlorn, lifeless eyes and was so heavy-laden with pain. you could see the suffering weighing her down and draining the life out of her. beholding her in that condition was one of the most horrible sights i had ever seen.
i once read an account of a missionary describing her worst moment - entering a Sudanese Dinka village after government-backed soldiers had raided it. she said that 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. devastation and death confronted the eyes everywhere.
her best moment, however, immediately follows her worst. she describes it like this:
"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 and push them into the earth. what were they doing? Fashioning instant memorials to those they had lost? no. these crosses, pressed into the ground at the moment when their bodies reeled and their hearts bled, were acts of faith. as followers of Jesus Christ, they served a God whom they believed knew pain as they knew pain. blinded by grief, horribly aware theat 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."
when i looked at our girl, i tangibly felt the horror of what she had suffered, and i could not fathom what it was like to have gone through it. but i knew Jesus was there, walking among that wreckage, and weeping as her heart wept, even though she may not have known it or felt it. He was there and He is with her now and He understands like no one else can, and she is beginning to realize that.
the Lord has already begun healing her. she has started to regain use of her arms, speak and interact with other children, smile. the healing is happening progressively, but she is daily improving. it is happening at the hands of our other children, who themselves have been touched by God and changed, and now they are reaching out and embracing and just being themselves. it is one of the most beautiful sights i have ever seen. the best follows the worst. beauty collides with tragedy.
isn't that the nature of who He is? He did not keep Himself distant from our suffering, but became one of us, so He knows it. but His knowing and understanding it is not the end of the story. He thrusts His beauty into it. He not only sympathizes with our pain; He brings resurrection, and i get to watch Him do it in this sweet girl's life.
David Crowder says it this way - "His divinity meets our depravity, and it's a beautiful collision."
