#prayforparis

I had been mulling over a list of favorite books about Africa and mission, in a nod to my autobiographical interlude later this morning. But, well, I think I will save the list for another day soon because of being thrown into sorrow, along with the rest of the world, well, half of the rest of the world, over the attacks on Paris yesterday. Stupidly spent the evening scrolling through Twitter, looking for news, and getting more and more angry. As usual, the startling juxtaposition of events alarmed and troubled me.

In the evening, Paris is attacked in the places where ordinary people are hanging around enjoying themselves, not bothering anybody. In the morning, a young college girl struggles to understand that if you take all the money away from the all the rich people, there still won’t be enough money to pay her tuition. And there was evening, and there was morning, another bad day of humanity wrecking everything.

Of course, as President Obama rushed in to remind us, the Paris attack was a crime “against all humanity”. I’m tired of hearing that. It wasn’t a crime, in the technical sense. It was much bigger than a crime. It was an aggressive act of war. And it wasn’t against all humanity. It was against particular people who were definitely and brutally killed. It’s against one particular portion of humanity– the portion that isn’t willingly joining in to be part of the Islamic state, the portion that doesn’t want women to be effaced and silenced by the niqab and burka, the portion that thinks women should be educated (more about that in a minute), the portion that believes each individual person should be allowed to sort out for himself, and even herself, what she believes and how she worships. To say it another way, it’s a cry of war against the west.

But the west doesn’t want to have a war, and so, in utter perversity, the leaders of the west continue insisting that we’re not different, we’re all on the same side and there’s no problem that cannot be solved by alleviating poverty and being people who “care” about the real root causes of violence, like not being able to afford Netflix. To help the Islamic state along, we have corporately produced poor Kilee and her helpless, ineffectual explanation of why she should receive free college. She isn’t covered up in a hijab, she is allowed to speak, but she has nothing to say. Her mind has been plundered of any sense, any rational thought by a world view that hates women too, and hates God. Before the barbarians arrived, we have transformed ourselves into them.

And how did we do this? Because we wanted everything to be free. We wanted college to be free, we wanted food to be free, we wanted peace and security to be free. We didn’t want to pay for it. And we thought that by offering everything free to the one who hates us, we could disarm their aggression. But free doesn’t produce love, it really produces anger. The most angry people, I can see, are those who are getting everything for free, or think they should be.

I have a theory about why this is so. It’s so interesting of God to make salvation a free gift. You can’t buy it. You can’t earn it. You can’t get it through trying or striving or crying or demanding. You have to just accept him and his work for who he is, and give him yourself. The free gift of eternal life is a perfect calculation to expose the deep, terrible, ugly sin of the individual’s rebellion. To say, I love you and I have done it all for you, paid it all, exposes the ugliness of human pride, an ugliness we’re seeing everywhere. Salvation is free, but the ultimate price is your own belief in yourself.

We have made a decadent and terrifying trade, in the west. Rather than the self, given freely to another, as Jesus does for us, we have lied and said that you can take. You can take another–their money, their voice, their speech, their words, their identity–and devour it for yourself. And so we have nothing to say to a radical religious ideology that does the same. There shouldn’t be any surprise, for us. Nor any grief. We have been given what we stretched out our hands to grab–a humanity so proud, so grasping, so thoughtless, that even war cannot open the eyes. May God have mercy.