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**Yesterday I wrote this post about the Christian Aid Ministries people who were kidnapped in Haiti.
I was unaware when I wrote the post that a member of CAM staff has been indicted in multiple counts of gross and minor sexual imposition on children, several of them in Haiti. CAM knew that he had a history of years of sexual offenses against minors and allowed him to continue in his position in Haiti.
I am profoundly sorry that I wrote this without doing sufficient research into the organization. I apologize for the hurt and confusion my post caused and am thankful to a friend who pointed these facts out to me about CAM’s history.
I am leaving this post up for many reasons and welcome people to engage in the topics below or this update as you feel inclined.
If you would like to see the valuable discussion which brought this to my attention, see my Facebook thread.
Thank you for keeping me informed and helping me to do good better.
You’ve probably read about the missionaries kidnapped about three weeks ago in Haiti. A group of 17 people who work for Christian Aid Ministries (CAM), including children as young as 8 months, were kidnapped as they left an orphanage. The kidnappers are demanding 1 million USD for each hostage.
The hostages are Anabaptist and the messages posted by CAM for prayer have surprised Christians and non-Christians around the world as they include prayer for the kidnappers and are rich with language of forgiveness. This powerful article by Donald Kraybill shows how these posts reveal “three distinctive refrains that reflect historic Anabaptist understandings of the Christian faith: the imperative to pray for the kidnappers, a nonresistant response to adversaries, and a commitment to forgive.”
This is stunning. It is radical. It is beautiful. It is so, so hard.
I have been told by some Christians that what God wants for me is my flourishing and this necessarily means that I am happy, comfortable, and safe. This means, then, that when things are hard in Djibouti for example, I need to leave. There are so many things wrong with this, I have a hard time knowing what to comment on.
If God wants me to be happy, comfortable, and safe, what does it mean when I get cancer? How do I respond to loss? What about when the temperature is too hot or too cold or I get hungry? Those aren’t comfortable feelings. What about the hard work of learning a language - it is highly uncomfortable and not always happy - should we, then, quit? I don’t usually feel happy at mile 22 in a marathon and I certainly don’t feel comfortable. Should I stop? Do we walk away from every conversation that is complicated? And what about the real, deep, hard challenges in marriage, parenting, finances…do we just quit it all every time we hit a snag?
Was Jesus happy, comfortable, and safe when people wanted to throw him off the cliff? When he had no place to lay his head? When his family fled to Egypt? When he was beaten, spit on, mocked, stripped, and murdered?
This idea creates an anemic faith that cannot withstand the buffeting winds of a real human existence. It creates an idol out of God and utterly misunderstands God’s character. It provides no language for dealing with pain or fear. It leaves no room for forgiveness, for courage, for endurance, for patience, for lament, for reality. It cannot create the kind of faith, which runs against every natural impulse, that is sustaining these kidnap victims, or their families.
We could talk about what kinds of risk people take in the name of faith, how much danger is too much danger, what does safety mean (something I write about often), about ethics, about peace-building.
I want to talk about painful faith. Faith that cries out, “This hurts! This is not justice! Where are you God?” And then casts itself on that God and says, “Help me. Forgive them. Let me know you are here.” That is the faith being modeled by the CAM group.
In my darkest moments, the times when I couldn’t breathe because of grief or fear or rage, the times I had to stop driving because I couldn’t see, had to lay down on the kitchen floor because I could no longer stand, had to hurl stones from cliffs and scream, lost my voice from crying, you know the moments. You are a human, you’ve had them too. In those moments, faith hurt. It hurt because it didn’t heal anything, it didn’t solve anything, it didn’t take away the emotions. But faith pointed me in a direction. I knew where to aim my sorrow and anger and confusion.
It doesn’t make sense. When 8-month old babies are kidnapped and threatened with death, not much makes sense. When people who love that baby, and the others, tell us to pray for the kidnappers, not much makes sense. But how else do we live? I don’t know how else to press on.
Some people say faith is a crutch and I’ve said before and keep on saying, amen, I’ll take it, thankful for a little help along the way.
Sitting with pain is one thing. Praying for one’s enemies who are causing that pain - that’s another whole level of radical, painful faith. And yet, we know exactly what we are called to do as Christians. Jesus couldn’t have been any more clear, “Pray for those who persecute you.”
How are you experiencing a call to radical, painful faith right now? It might not be as dramatic as praying for kidnappers or as sorrowful as lying terrified on the kitchen floor, crying, but what is God asking you to trust God for, with, in?
For more:
An updated thread on the kidnapping situation, by CAM
Witnesses of the Kingdom, my article for Plough after John Allen Chau was killed in southeast Asia.
Radical Forgiveness by Rahma at A Life Overseas. This article will take your breath away and make you cry.
The Quick to Listen podcast has an excellent episode on risk and faith with Anna Hampton, I’d love to talk more about this in the future. I recommend the interview as well as her book: Facing Danger: a Guide through Risk.
On Kidnapping and Forgiving
Well this hits close to home. About that same time frame, there was a premeditated attempted kidnapping on my own boys, middle of the day, in our front yard. While we praise God the men were unsuccessful, the RAGE. I cannot explain the rage, and I have a feeling many reading this have felt it before. Through it, the huge question of "what does forgiveness look like/what is it?" rang strong throughout my mind. A mentor of mine affirmed that forgiveness is NOT excusing evil; in fact, I meshed together a prayer from the Psalms: "Break the arms of evil men; shove them in the dust like dung, and cover their faces with shame until they repent." Whoa, right? But the idea of forgiving those evil men who plotted and planned to bring harm (death??) to my children seemed sick at first. The rage is gone, the tears are done, and I can start to think about forgiveness. I'm not there yet, full honesty. How do you know when you've forgiven? How do you even get to that point? How do I live out this crucial tenet of our faith when it seriously feels impossible?
No advice here. Just more struggle.