Not far from Nairobi two old male lions crossed our road. They showed their age in all respects, a glazed eye, tatters and scars, attitude toward us with equal parts of boredom and disdain. No matter how halt they both may have been, both they and we knew perfectly that they did not answer to us.
Since September 11, I have felt that we have been returned to a world of wild things. For a time we had lived comfortably with the delusions that the important forces in life had been domesticated, but we were wrong. We do not control as much of our surroundings as we wish we did. We live among the uncontrolled. If our faith is one of our tools to control our surroundings, it is not working. But that is not, and really has never been, what our faith is about.
We are Christians and are equipped, thereby, to live peaceably within and among the completely undomesticated actions and emotions and terrors and unexpected futures, whatever they may be. Our first inclination is to love God's people in crisis. But how to do that with peace in our hearts, with equanimity, with holy poise, that is to say, with grace? It is to know that we are saved not as a means to control, but as a means to thrive amidst the wild, the undomesticated. For, "he was crucified, dead and buried, but on the third day he raised from the dead and ascended..." For Christians, life and control are opposites. "Therefore, choose life, that thou and thy descendants might live."
UMCOR is your Christian mission in the mist of the most outrageous hurly-burly and the wild. God bless us.
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