Category Archives: Topics–Special Interest

On June 10, 1944, just a few days after the Allied invasion at Normandy, 200 German S.S. troops surrounded a little French village, Oradour-sur-Glane. By nightfall, all but 3 escapees and a half a dozen others had been massacred. 642 men, women, and children dead.

Some say the Germans mistook this village for another with a similar name, another Oradour whose Resistance fighters, the machi, had abducted a SS officer earlier in the week. At the official memorial site, interpreters believe the attack was likely ordered as part of Himmler’s ongoing campaign of terror. Whatever the precise reason for the massacre, the killings were brutal, cruel, and completely unjustified.

Jill and I silently drifted from ruin to ruin in the half razed village, preserved as a memorial. As I wandered by the school, the church, and what remained of the little shops in the center of the village, I imagined the scene just hours before the soldiers arrived. Cafés were selling coffee. Coiffeurs were cutting hair. Men and women were working in the fields or selling their products in town. The children were running up and down the street, some helping their parents, others just enjoying summer vacation.

By evening, nearly all these precious lives were reduced to smoldering, bullet ridden corpses.

Some 400 women and children were herded to the church. Into the packed sanctuary, soldiers threw grenades before shooting those who weren’t immediately killed. One man who went to the village shortly after the massacre found three boys, ages 10-12, huddled together near the altar, where they had desperately clung to life and to each other, before succumbing to death. Before turning away from the horror he could no longer stomach, he noticed an infant still in its baby carriage, shot dead.

In the sanctuary, my eyes fell upon the now-rusted-out, crushed carriage still standing there, testifying to the extent of the callous brutality. I felt sick.

The men were divided into groups and taken to various barns where there were few entrances or exits, thus minimizing their chance of escape. Machine guns were set up to mow them down. Dead or alive, everyone in the village was eventually doused with gasoline and set afire. Fewer than 10% of the bodies were identifiable after the German soldiers had finished executing their orders.

I thought it odd that I felt almost nothing for almost two hours, until I realized that I simply couldn’t believe what I was reading and seeing. I was in shock, and couldn’t take in the horror of it all.

It’s not as if I didn’t already know about the millions who had died in concentration camps and gas chambers, the pogroms conducted over the centuries, and the even more horrific genocides in Rwanda, Armenia, Bosnia, Cambodia and elsewhere. Maybe it was the senseless, cold-blooded brutality against innocent villagers that so disturbed me. Maybe it was the realization that the killers looked just like me, and their victims just like the people in my own family. Or, maybe it was a growing sense of terror that what happened in this little village less than a century ago could happen again, anywhere, at any time, given the right conditions. And probably would again and again and again.

When I got to the cemetery, I found numerous memorials. The most disturbing were those displaying four, six, eight or more photographs of members of the same family. Organized in descending order by age, I saw the once smiling faces of eighty- year-old grandparents alongside their sons, daughters, in-laws, and grandchildren. One little boy was only thirteen days old when he had been slaughtered along with with seven other family members.

A Prayer “Loving God, save us from ourselves. Please break our hearts over our own hatred, desires for revenge, violent words and actions. Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who have sinned against us. Lead us not into temptation to strike out against others, but deliver us from the evil within us as well as the evil all around us. Lead us to your well of grace and love that we may drink from it.  Cleanse us by your living water…and compel us to offer that same gift to others.”

She saw herself floating out the window. On her back, feet forward, she was leaving this world. She had to make a decision, and fast. Was she going to choose to live or to die?

Jill and I had just returned from nearly three weeks in Africa. The view from our Paris hotel room was stunning. Three days to recuperate alongside the Seine River across the street from Notre Dame Cathedral sounded perfect. However, awakened by sharp chest pains around 12:30 a.m., our dream suddenly disfigured into a terrifying nightmare. With her life in the balance, she heard herself say, “NO! I have a husband. I have two sons!”

We didn’t know it at the time, but Jill was experiencing a potentially fatal pulmonary embolism, stemming from a deep vein thrombosis in one of her legs. A blood clot, formed during the long overnight flight from Nairobi, Kenya, broke loose, and traveled up her veins. After passing through her heart, it entered her lungs in one or more pieces, choking off oxygen to vital regions.

From a medical point of view, five days in the hospital and a steady dose of blood thinners saved her life. However, her decision to come back through the window for the sake of her sons and me may have been even more instrumental to her survival.

Few truly want to die, but choosing to live for the sake of others under such circumstances is not a given. The crisis revealed the depth of her love for her family, and her decision showed the extent of her devotion.

In prison, the Apostle Paul similarly found himself in a struggle between living and dying. We don’t know if he was at risk of being executed or simply felt he had an option to surrender his life to his suffering. Whatever the case, under his circumstances, death had become increasingly attractive.

In his letter to the Philippians, Paul described his ambivalence about living and explained his rationale for the choice he finally made:

For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain. If I am to go on living in the body, this will mean fruitful labor for me. Yet what shall I choose? I do not know! I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far; but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body. Convinced of this, I know that I will remain, and I will continue with all of you for your progress and joy in the faith, so that through my being with you again your joy in Christ Jesus will overflow on account of me. (Philippians 1:21-26, NIV)

Paul did not choose life because he was afraid to die. His relationship with Jesus Christ and his faith actually made the next life very appealing. However, he said no to death, because he had a stronger reason to live.

Most of us are not aware of making a decision about life or death, or even feel that we have any say in the matter. But the truth is, every day we are deciding, and we do have a say.

I’m not talking just about our power to affect our physical wellbeing. I’m referring to coming to grips with our raison d’être—our reason to wake up in the morning. I, for one, have no interest in simply trudging through life, just keeping busy or passively yielding to the demands and expectations of the status quo. I refuse to go through the motions of looking alive, when I am actually dying on the inside. I want to live, and want to do so with the meaning, purpose, and passion that grow out of God’s unique calling on my life.

We have choices. We can allow ourselves to be controlled by misguided values and empty pursuits, or we can look at our lives as a series of opportunities to make a difference. How we find the life we were meant to live will be different for each one of us, but only by making a concerted effort to discover and to pursue our callings will we truly live.

Near death experiences like Jill’s slap us in the face. We suddenly grasp that we cannot take our life for granted. Like Ebenezer Scrooge, after his encounter with the Ghost of Christmas Future, we may gratefully gulp down the air whose consumption proves that we still are alive. In our moment of second chances, we may eagerly search about for whatever changes we can quickly make while we still can.

You may not see yourself going out a window feet first, having to choose between life and death, but you do have life or death choices to make. What are they going to be?

A Prayer

“Dear Lord God, I want to live. I mean truly live. Please show me where I have settled for lesser gods or simply meaningless preoccupations, and set me free. Lead me in the path of life, and give me the wisdom, courage, and strength to take the next steps available to me…for Christ’s sake, for mine, and for all those you want to bless through me. Amen.”

On spiritual retreat in Chartres, France, I am seeking God—looking at stained-glass windows, walking the labyrinth, taking long runs by the river, reading Scripture, worshiping in community, thinking, writing, and praying. This is the first in a series of postings on knowing and following Jesus more fully.

Yesterday, a pastor who attended my “Spirit-Led Leader” workshop in Myanmar wrote to me to ask me for suggestions for his Easter Sunday sermon. My answer was a question: “What brings you the most joy and power from your Christian faith?”

For me, the answer is pretty simple. Nothing has more dramatically impacted my life and perspective on the future than Jesus—his life, death, and resurrection—and the hope he gives me of eternal life with God after death.

Recently, one of my sons and I went to see the movie, Knowing. Nicholas Cage stars as a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, who stumbles upon a sheet of numbers buried in the ground 50 years earlier. The more he investigates, the more he discovers that the numbers might be pointing to a series of disasters. Can he figure out the code? Can he stop the disaster from happening? Can he convince his scientist friends that he is not crazy?

I won’t give away the ending, but let me say this film goes where “no man (or woman) has gone before”. Well, actually, the apocalyptic genre is well represented in literature, but few films dare to grapple with the end of the world in such a sobering manner, without a super-hero implausibly saving the day. In doing so, the film taps into the worst fears gripping much of the human race today (annihilation), while grappling with powerful human experiences that lead so many to faith in a higher power and in life after death.

Knowing terrified and comforted both. There is hope for those who are “called” and who listen to the “whispering” of the benevolent voices, warning them and guiding them. The biblical writers do something quite similar in dealing with ultimate matters. Prophets and apostles terrify those who dare to spurn the will of God, while offering hope to those who are called to faith by the grace of God, and who listen and follow the leading of the Spirit.

The biggest difference between the movie and the Bible is that Scripture actually names the source of our hope—Jesus Christ—and puts the hope of salvation within reach of anyone who believes.

Last week, Jill and I led a prayer walk for the Chemin Neuf (New Way) Christian Community on the labyrinth on the stone floor of the magnificent Chartres Cathedral. As I approached the center, I found myself asking God to show me the way forward in my life. In a flash, the words of Jesus came to my mind: “I am the way, the truth and the life” (John 14:6).

I had my answer. I still have many questions and issues to resolve, but I know where my process needs to start. Knowing God and knowing how to best proceed need to be grounded in my relationship with Jesus. It seems I keep forgetting this most basic of spiritual truths.

Holy Week is a very good time to come to know Jesus better by taking extra time to focus on him, his life, his death, and his resurrection. What else—who else—can better help you know what your life is about and give you better hope for the future?

What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead. (Philippians 3:8-11, NIV)