crisis mentality

It started Thursday morning, with the verse “do not pray for the peace and prosperity of these people”. A verse I read, a verse I wrote down, and a verse I promptly forgot.

Then last Thursday night, after a fellowship meeting I went to the church. Refugee F is sitting defiantly at the reception desk, while his wife is sitting on a pile of their belongings just inside the door. A few suitcases surround them. Just outside the door, Refugee X and his family have laid out their mattresses and piled high their belongings over a 20 square meter area.

The conversation is one sided. They tell me about government buses arriving yesterday and pastors telling the people they need to board. How unfair it was to expect the people to have to go back to where they had been attacked, how unfair it was that they hadn’t eaten at all that day, how unfair it was that they were to be expected to sleep outside in the wind. This from a man whom I heard tell a reporter that he is prepared to pay R2500 per month for rent.

They tell me, in the silences between outbursts, the message coming across strong and clear, that I have let them down, that they had trusted me to solve their issues, and I have not done so, that I have failed them but there was still time to redeem myself by finding them accommodation, food, warmth, and place for 15 people before midnight.

Returning home I sought God’s wisdom in this as I have found in the past weeks that my frame of reference for all the questions is so hopelessly inadequate. Several things were brought to my attention.

• Do we do things for people in a humanitarian effort, just as the world would do it, or should we ask what he has in his plan each day? Ask as if we’re interested, and actually wait for an answer? Are we to be the willing slaves of everyone, as if that means we are meek and mild, or are we to stand for what God is doing now in response to that which happened some time in the past?

• What we sow we reap.
  Justice demands punishment for atrocities. Words like holocaust and genocide echo hauntingly. In human terms we hunt down those who have done gross deeds of injustice, and yet question a God who might be doing just this before our eyes.

To quote this morning’s reading from Hosea 9:7

the day of punishment is here
the day of recompense is here

A google on “recompense” brings up a translation of the Quran

Hilali/Khan Nay! But you deny the Recompense (reward for good deeds and punishment for evil deeds).

Heavy words.

For the last four weeks I have looked at the people in our care as being just people. People with needs, babies, noise, graceful, ingratitude, but basically just people. I heard the words going around, the countries named, the cliques formed, but I never looked at it from a higher perspective – all these people are in South Africa, having fled their own countries, ostensibly in pursuit of a better life.

Their history is obliterated in the eye of the crisis, their needs are met with superhuman effort, the emphasis being “human” because I never stopped to think, where did this person come from, what did he do to arrive on my doorstep? What makes up the man, the women, the children around me? Why is it that even the children have an insolent glare? What happened back then that makes these people here expect that I could wave such a wand?

Could it be that they come from a world where such wands are waved? Could such a wand be expected to happen just because they are who they are? Taking it closer to home, or rather to God, what could these people have done that God would say “don’t pray for their peace or prosperity.” and “the day of recompense is here”?

Why, I thought, were only these two families left literally on the church doorstep. Why them? Why so in-our-face? Why? Now armed with the two scriptures I have to ask myself: am I in danger of not letting their past catch up with them. Have we been guilty of aiding and abetting war criminals?

The self-proclaimed leader of the group stands up and leans into my face. Did I know, he glares, that he is the son of a former Minister of Home Affairs in DRC? Did I know that he did his senior schooling in Belgium for five years? Did I know that he was something in the military in his country? That he has a degree?

The penny is starting to drop. Yes, I have been looking at things in the naivety of a simple “you need, I can give” mentality. I have ached at the questions asked, what will now happen to them? I have unthinkingly believed that we should pray for the people, for a better future, without it ever entering my mind that I could possibly be standing between a God of justice and a wicked, wicked man?

Could it be that my prayers could limit God’s action in their lives, that by honouring my prayer He wouldn’t be free to exact out the full measure of his anger? Or do we, with our humanitarian hat on, ignore the atrocities of the past and simply embrace him because he is a man in need now? Will history one day condemn us because we helped to prevent justice finding its mark?

The U.S. Government travel fact sheet has this to say of the current state of the country:

ECONOMY
Sparsely populated in relation to its area, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is home to a vast potential of natural resources and mineral wealth. Nevertheless, the D.R.C. is one of the poorest countries in the world, with per capita annual income of about $300 in 2007. This is the result of years of mismanagement, corruption, and war.

A GDP of $9.85 billion and only a per capita of $300??? That works out to an annual income of R2400.00 – yes, annual

This page speaks of unimaginable pain. Pain that was inflicted by and as a result of the military and rebel wars, for the ultimate profit of global interests. The country remains in pain because it benefits us for it to be so.

All my research into life in the D.R.C. over the last 40 years speaks of an elite section of society, kept in luxury at the expense of vast numbers kept in utter poverty. It speaks of a privileged lifestyle for members of a specific tribal ancestry, a place where you had to be a supporter of the cause to be able to hold down any government position, to espouse the ideals and the methods in order to be able to afford the ability to send one’s children to a Belgian school, and still afford a university education. In short, you had to be like them, to do things the way they did them, in order to hold down a high rank in the military. Nowhere does the research speak of a benevolent military presence.

Justice will be done.