Alys Willman: Mission worker in El Salvador

Yesterday we all lost brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers. We have lost family members in El Salvador, in Rwanda, in Palestine. Our sisters were raped in Bosnia. Our children were strangled in Guatemala. Our brothers and sisters are dying in Colombia.

Marc Forget, Friend of missionaries here in Nicaragua

Today’s attacks took place in the country that has the most extensive and expensive "intelligence" and military machines in the world. It should be abundantly clear now that more force and weapons will not make the world a safer place. The answer lies elsewhere.

Michael Moore, The Michael Moore

. . . What I do know is that all day long I have heard everything about this Bin Laden guy except this one fact—WE created the monster known as Osama bin Laden!

Where did he go to terrorist school? At the CIA!

Don’t take my word for it—I saw a piece on MSNBC last year that laid it all out. When the Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan, the CIA trained him and his buddies in how to commit acts of terrorism against the Soviet forces. It worked! The Soviets turned and ran. Bin Laden was grateful for what we taught him and thought it might be fun to use those same techniques against us.

We abhor terrorism—unless we’re the ones doing the terrorizing.

Congressmen and Senators spent the day calling for more money for the military; one Senator on CNN even said he didn’t want to hear any more talk about more money for education or health care—we should have only one priority: our self-defense.

Will we ever get to the point that we realize we will be more secure when the rest of the world isn’t living in poverty so we can have nice running shoes?

Let’s mourn, let’s grieve, and when it’s appropriate let’s examine our contribution to the unsafe world we live in.

It doesn’t have to be like this . . .

Jeff and Beth Rogers, Mission workers near Hinche, Haiti

September 10th, 2001

The enormity of brokenness and the reality of our inadequacy for the task to which we are called have never been more real to Beth and me than since beginning work here in Haiti We are often tempted simply to ignore the enormity of pain and injustice in the world, just bury it. But God calls us, who are inadequate, to perform the impossible. We are called to incessantly testify against all reasonable odds and all hope to the redemptive reality present to us in the person of Christ.

At its root, the gospel is very bad news before it can be good news; otherwise there is no good news at all. If the gospel ignored the realities of oppression in the world, the realities of Haiti, and of our own inadequacies, it would be just another diversion from reality, like a silly game, or just like another prime time television show. May God give us supernatural courage to feel the brokenness around and in us and to weep with those who weep. May these present realities of poverty, oppression and our inadequacy be the vivid and sobering sacrament through which Christ’s broken body yields to the hope of our resurrected Lord.

September 11th, 2001

I sat down this morning intending to throw away the above letter and begin a new one, but [I realized] that perhaps it is relevant. We, arguably the most wealthy, the best protected, and the most sheltered nation the world has ever known, have just had a shocking slap in the face. One that awakens in us a sense of terrible vulnerability that is the common experience of so many neighbors, brothers and sisters, who share our globe. We are compelled to realize our connectedness in a world full of pain, a world over which we have very little control. What will we do with that?

Will we bury it, try to convince ourselves that our might is adequate protection, vow revenge, and clamor for greater allocations to our military budget? I pray to God with tears that it not be so among His people.

Mark A. Hare

The 2001 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 251