Sober

The story for me began in the ‘70s. I wrote about that here.

This past weekend our team from Northern Ireland walked on the ground and through the places where the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge took place in dark and devilish secrecy.

For most of the team, seeing this for the first time, and, as most were born after these events happened, it was a numbing shock and heart-rending glimpse into the depravity that can be reached by demonically driven philosophies of the fallen human heart.

For me, I was struck by odd things, like the peacefulness and beauty outside the cells of cruelty and torture, and the locations where so many thousands lost their lives in the “killing fields”. It was unexpected.

Hearing the news back in the late ‘70s (often without seeing it in pictures and on film) I had imagined an entirely different scenario to what was the reality for those who were so cruelly treated and ultimately lost their lives.

While the experience of walking those places of terror and anguish, even against such a backdrop of unexpected peace and tranquility in nature, I did not find it as shocking as the others—I had lived it all vicariously through the daily news reports of the time—but I was sobered as we heard on our audio players the stories and saw the way everything fit together: the pieces of news I had heard were now seen in the places where it all happened.

This cycle of violence happens continually on this planet, and I do not remember a time in my life when there was not some genocide or war happening in some country or countries in the world.

We have a Message of Good News, a Gospel, that brings people out of the war within their souls into the peace beyond understanding that comes with belief in Jesus and the new birth. As we have shared the Gospel with people here we have seen many discover His peace, His healing and His Presence in the lives of those left behind when their loved ones were taken.

“Here we have no continuing city”. There is a glorious future for the believers who have entrusted their all into His loving Hands. And while we walk the streets and fields of this planet, until we go to be with Him, we know His abundant life, His peace and above all His Presence with us.