“The most alarming thing in your human is not the evil he does, but the fact that he can do it without feeling alarmed.” CS Lewis in The Screwtape Letters

MAMA! The word, perfectly articulated for the very first time by the cutest little boy with a mop of unruly curly hair and bright hazelnut eyes, is like the sweetest music to the ears of his young mother. She was told that he would never speak, but something wonderful happened deep inside her little boy earlier today when she babysat the little boy from upstairs. While cleaning up in the kitchen, she overheard how the little visitor told her son a story about a wonderful man who loves children more than adults. It made her smile, but upon hearing the name JESUS, she walked over to the boys and made a startling discovery. It was not the visitor who spoke the name of JESUS, it was her own (mute) son! And now, he has just called her MAMA. Jesus is real!

The old woman closes her eyes as her soft whimpering sobs turn into gut-wrenching moans of despair. Her two grown sons are expected to arrive at her door at any moment and she has no food to serve them. She, herself, has gone without food for a fourth consecutive day and what started out as hunger pangs have transformed into rapidly weakening fatigue. From a place of sheer desperation, she starts praying to the God of the lovely family next door to her. The beautiful twin girls are always so helpful and friendly and all of them radiate an inexplicably warm, bright light from their eyes. They call their God ADONAI EL ROI and it means THE GOD WHO SEES ME. She needs Him too, she needs Him to see her also.

A family of four has gathered at their kitchen table. They take hands and the brave father prays in a gentle voice which masks his own anguish and fear. Despite the relentless persecution they have been subjected to, he has faithfully raised his 11-year-old twin daughters and 4-year-old son to follow and serve Jesus Christ. They had to flee for their lives once before and they might have to do so again. He still remembers the horror of looking straight into her eyes and noticing that her pupils were blown even before she collapsed and how he had to rescue their wailing newborn from her lifeless hands after she had collapsed. His beloved wife was mercilessly executed by means of a headshot, right in front of him. OH LORD, NOT OUR WILL, BUT YOUR WILL BE DONE. AMEN.

At the bottom of the stairwell in the lobby of the apartment building, four soldiers with automated rifles intimidate a small group of civilians who have just arrived home after a harrowing day on the streets of a village in a war torn country. Among the civilians are two brothers with a broken basket filled with various kinds of food scraps for their elderly mother upstairs, a few older men and a visibly injured young man who narrowly escaped being stoned to death by an angry mob of religious fanatics. The bleeding young man is eager to be reunited with his wife and son. The expressions on the faces of the soldiers reveal something akin to depraved indifference, only it is really orders of magnitude more evil than that. They are clearly no longer soldiers fighting a legitimate war, they have become vigilante mercenaries senselessly slaughtering and maiming vulnerable people in some unspeakably cruel blood sport. Their bold recklessness have caused them to disregard communication about crucial changes in battle strategies and their presence in that lobby revealed their intentional disobedience of their commander’s explicit instructions to stay put for the remainder of the day. They have a diabolical drive to repeat their nefarious war crimes, having derived perverse pleasure from it. Their ravaged, mutilated 15-year-old victim was dead and they came to replace her with two innocent 11-year-olds.

Everybody hears the suspicious thud and the chilling time-slowing silence which follows. FLASH. CHILL. BANG. CRASH. Just another BUNKER BUSTER BOMB dropped in a justified act of war. The news about it spreads like wildfire to every corner of the known world and everyone knows the name of the war, but nobody cares to know the names of the deceased people.

Author’s whisper, an echo from the gap:

The picture for this reflection reveals the gap between the fingers of Adam and God in a partial portrayal of Michelangelo’s CREATION OF ADAM which appears on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. We, mere mortals, live inside that gap, in a broken world where crazy chaos prevails. I chose the quote from CS Lewis to illustrate the self-righteous callousness with which man harms man. This story is fiction, but it is based on real events. At first I wanted to shout at the top of my voice, but after attending an insightful missionary workshop at my beloved Pellissier Gemeente, I decided to, instead, whisper in gentleness. There is only ONE MAN able to bridge the gap and His Name, Jesus Christ, is above ALL other names.

Lord Jesus, thank You for bridging the gap for ALL of us! You know ALL of us by name and You love ALL of us. Please help me to see ALL other people in the same way You see them. And, as I can never remember ALL of their names, please help me to love like You do while I, too, remain nameless. Amen.