Saturday, September 26, 2009
Goodbye Grandma
Some of you that know me may have heard that my grandma passed away on Thursday. I've been taking it okay, but I appreciate your thoughts and prayers for my whole family, especially my mom and my uncle who've just lost their mom.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Maybe we are a threat
For several years, I've subscribed to the Persecution and Prayer Alert from Voice of the Martyrs. Every week, they send news about persecuted Christians, and sometimes they urge their readers to write letters or emails to governments in defense of these persecuted Christians. Once in a while, I've written letters (but I guess it's been a while).
The Voice of the Martyrs website has some letter writing tips and I think they used to have some examples to follow, but I can't find any right now. In an email to a foreign government, I seem to remember saying something like, "The Bible teaches us to submit to our governments and obey the law, so Christians in your country are not a threat to your government," based on a sample letter I'd read. While it's true that as Christians, we are supposed to obey the law when it doesn't mean disobeying God, something about what I said didn't sit right with me, even as I wrote it. Maybe I'd already heard about how the church had been involved in bringing down communism, mostly peacefully, in Poland. Or maybe I realized that when people have a higher loyalty than their own government, that can non-violently undermine a government.
The more time that passes, the less I believe that Christianity is not a threat to oppressive governments. Sometimes I'm not even sure how it works, but when we serve a God who "opposes the proud and gives grace to the humble" (James 4:6), oppressive people and institutions can't stand forever. And if God can conquer death by dying, maybe Christians can conquer oppressors by submitting to them while being loyal to God above all. (But that's easy for me to say, sitting here, experiencing relatively little persecution.)
Ironically, I'm probably less sure of God's existence than I was when I wrote the letter I mentioned.
The Voice of the Martyrs website has some letter writing tips and I think they used to have some examples to follow, but I can't find any right now. In an email to a foreign government, I seem to remember saying something like, "The Bible teaches us to submit to our governments and obey the law, so Christians in your country are not a threat to your government," based on a sample letter I'd read. While it's true that as Christians, we are supposed to obey the law when it doesn't mean disobeying God, something about what I said didn't sit right with me, even as I wrote it. Maybe I'd already heard about how the church had been involved in bringing down communism, mostly peacefully, in Poland. Or maybe I realized that when people have a higher loyalty than their own government, that can non-violently undermine a government.
The more time that passes, the less I believe that Christianity is not a threat to oppressive governments. Sometimes I'm not even sure how it works, but when we serve a God who "opposes the proud and gives grace to the humble" (James 4:6), oppressive people and institutions can't stand forever. And if God can conquer death by dying, maybe Christians can conquer oppressors by submitting to them while being loyal to God above all. (But that's easy for me to say, sitting here, experiencing relatively little persecution.)
Ironically, I'm probably less sure of God's existence than I was when I wrote the letter I mentioned.
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