Low odds that count

Sorry if my thoughts sound so disjointed today. It's not easy to figure out this world.

A praise Just learned last night that our friend's daughter regained consciousness yesterday. She had to have a leg amputated below the knee. Please continue to keep this family in your prayers. For privacy and respect I will not reveal their names, but God will know whom we are praying for. She is beginning to heal, but there is a long road ahead. Her injury will be a constant reminder.

In Anne Applebaum's column yesterday in the Washington Post, 'The Low-Odds Factor' (click on today's title link above), she writes that with 7-million people living in London, and all the millions that commute into London every day, that to have only something like 50 people die is a really low odd. As much as it pains me, I understand her rather choleric reasoning.

But who would have thought that out of all those millions, John and I would have somehow come to know, indirectly, two of the victims? We did not know Jamie Gordon, but some good friends at church had asked for prayers on Sunday, and are now grieving his loss. Our friend from the Diocese is someone we have met in person, and spoken with over the phone several times. She served us, as she serves so many others on a daily basis. Now her child is in hospital, critically injured, faced with a long rehab. Even if we are not in her family’s inner circle, our Christian family can hold them up in prayer for the long journey ahead.

I would really like to take a meal to her family, but I am learning that this is not something the British Christians are accustomed to. It makes them feel highly uncomfortable, and weighted down by the inconvenient prospect of having to return in kind some day. I’ve already been scolded for bringing too much food to what we American Christians fondly call ‘pot lucks’. So I am stepping out in faith that prayers to God are more powerful than comfort food (and they are, I just know it!).

By now, the authorities have found at least three of the London bombers, and are on the trail of the fourth and a fifth. Our large Muslim communities are shocked, saddened, and indeed outraged, that the bombers grew up in their midst. Several innocent Muslims were also victims. None of this makes any kind of sense. Some serious soul-searching is going on at Parliament as well as within our churches and communities. It is time to brush away the damage 'religion' has played in these events and get to the heart of the matter

How are we raising our kids in today's society? Some of us try to apply Christian principals to the parenting skills. But even kids raised in Christian churches can grow up to be holy terrors. How does this happen? Who torched those churches in Tennessee last week? Which neighbourhood kids stole and torched the latest car on our nearby green last week?

I get upset when I see journalists write about ‘Muslim terrorists’. When a Christian commits a heinous crime or act of terror, do the journalists write ‘Christian terrorists’? When we lived in Kandahar, Afghanistan, we noted that the Afghan families had a stronger base for morality than some of the American families in our USAID compound or especially the Peace Corps workers who lived amongst the Afghan communities in Kandahar. It could make for delicate diplomacy, because our Afghan servants had eyes and ears to report what went on behind the closed doors of the American family homes. The Peace Corps members all drank, smoked, and slept around, and would come back to town highly inebriated after a wild party at the USAID compound. Why would the Afghan Muslims even want to model their behaviours after what they witnessed from the Americans? They thought we were stupid.

Our Muslim friends here in the UK (and US!) apply their Islamic principles to their children, and those principles are just as righteous to them as ours are to us. Have you noticed how your Muslim friends discipline and teach their children? They try just as hard to shield them from the sexual undertones and bad language of TV shows and movies as the rest of us. And yet their children can torch society as abhorrently as ours. Who are we to compare the scales of tragedy? For one family to have to mourn the loss of a mother, father, sister, brother, etc, is one too many. It only takes attending one funeral to know how de-sensitised we have become. Imagine having to attend multiple funerals in one day, as many are doing in our world.

Terror comes in many forms and today it seems to have spiralled out of control. That an angry young suicidal man can plough into a bunch of little kids and, as happened in Baghdad yesterday, kill them all is an outrage, not another news item.

It's time we all got a grip and figured out how to repair the damage that started it all in the first place. Where's the dialogue? And where's the leadership and action? We Americans might have got a clue when the tragedy at Columbine in Colorado happened. But complacency set in after the celebrity died down. A lot of bad stuff with messed up kids has happened since then. And after about three years of peace, there was a big bad riot in Belfast yesterday. Sadly, churches and other massive places of worship have not been the answers.

I will try to become more cheery before I write again. Maybe another day. Sorry.