By Rebecca Erickson
Agony!
Bodies hacked, shot, mutilated.
Cries of mothers, fathers, children, and babies are heard like the cries of the birds waiting to feed on the carnage.
Destruction and devastation of people and places, shattered by raw hatred.
Everyone, everywhere in fear while no one seems to care.
Flight and fright drive people from the hostile land to yet more hostile places.
God seems to have hidden his face, from him comes only silence.
Hate: taught, caught, sought to drive guerilla fighters forward.
Injury—the terrible, soul-rending, body-ripping injury of rape happening to women, children, the hapless, and the helpless.
Justice has fled, fled so far it seems impossible it could ever be found again.
Killing of bodies almost seems a mercy—there are so many things worse than death.
“Lord, Lord,” cry the Christians who have so faithfully partaken of his body and blood, whose own blood is now shed.
Many are the Christians around the world who could be raising pleas to heaven and to governments for South Sudan, yet we remain apathetic, uninvolved as though it was not a part of our very own body, the body of Christ being bloodied.
No one, it seems, cares when your life is taken if your skin is black, even though your blood runs red like every human’s.
Open mouths cry out to heaven but only a few….
Plans for a day of mourning are made in the Covenant denomination—a call to all Christians to lament for South Sudan, but will it be heard? Will it be heeded?
Quiet, O God, please—quiet.
Rest—Sabbath rest for a torn, tossed people.
Shalom—will these ever return?
Turn your face once again to our sisters and brothers of South Sudan.
Understand, please God, understand—although there can be no understanding for our apathy as we live so far away in such relative safety.
Very God, we beg your forgiveness for we sin against both you and our fellow Christians—our fellow human beings—when we do not care, we do not cry, we do not come to you in prayer for them.
Wipe away every tear from their eyes and from ours as you heal their land and break our uncaring hearts.
(e)Xamine your hearts and lives, O believers.
Yield them over to sorrow for those who are beyond sorrow—be…
Zealous in lament this day.
