Day 13: To the Hill

Before I proceed, I did manage to drum up a blurry camel for you as follows: 

  
(You might even note a few in the background.)

This afternoon, after parting with one of our guides, another beacon of light in the darkness, I can only think of the days of labor he has had and will continue to have in a crisis without an end. I think of the old saying that one death is a tragedy, but 100,000 deaths are just a statistic… But to our guides, the local church in all the places we have been, each of the thousands is still an individual. Time and time again, I said, “I’m sorry” and “I will do my best to help people understand what you’ve been through,” the refugee pointed to the local guide. “I had no one to help me,” they say, “Except him.” 

When the stories hit over and over, you have to become a bit distant, a refugee worker of two years told me. But, he said, sometimes something will still happen that stops him cold.

Today, I feel the coldness of some of the horror I have been unable to process. 

I keep seeing a man running across the desert to the Jordan border. I hear the clatter of machine guns being fired randomly across the expanse of  broken rock and sand, hoping to hit people like him. There’s a hill ahead, and over the hill is the country of Jordan. He passes dead bodies of people less successful, dozens of them, and reaches the top, bullet-free. A Jordanian soldier welcomes him and tells him where to go. 

“They were so kind,” he remembers. 

That’s neat, I tell him, I hadn’t heard that said before. 

“I can only say my experience,” he says.

I don’t know why the Jordanian soldiers in the hill nearly affected me so. I heard that they were also sometimes hit by the random fire.  

Maybe it strikes me because this is what Christians are called to be.  People may have a thousand reasons for craving kindness.  But in the end, does it matter? Jesus taught by example. 

I wish you grace today to extend a hand to the person in your life exhausted from running, across whatever figurative desert they find themselves in, even if you don’t have any idea what you’re going to do next.