Yesterday I finally caught up on my Voice of the Martyr’s magazines. I tend to let them pile up two or three deep before I get around to reading them. Mostly because they can be very difficult to read, but also because I tend to read them on Sunday afternoons. And since Sunday afternoons are my one afternoon to nap, these days I fall asleep long before I even pick them up, let alone read a word!
This afternoon I was determined to get through at least two of the three before I couldn’t keep my eyes open, so I started on the first while Ethan was sitting on the potty before going down for his nap and Emry was curled up on the couch playing a cause and effect game on Ed’s tablet. I wasn’t two pages into it when Emry got stuck and crawled up on my chair for help. I knew she would see the picture on the page facing her and thought about putting it aside before she did but then wondered if she would say anything when she saw it. She did.
“Mama,” she said, staring at it intently, “what is wrong with that lady’s face?”
The woman in question was an Indonesian Christian who had been walking into her church one Sunday morning to pick up her daughter in Sunday School when Islamic suicide bombers drove their truck through the front gate of the church complex and crashed it in the parking lot, setting off the bombs in their vehicle which, in turn, caused several nearby vehicles’ gas tanks to also explode into massive fire. Caught in this tragedy, the woman suffered burns over 85% of her body. They were so extensive, in fact, that doctors are amazed she survived. She has gone through over twenty surgeries to help her skin but it is so fragile grafting is out of the question and she can’t even hug her own daughter any longer.
Details, politics and false religions aside, I explained to Emry that some men who hated people who love Jesus set a fire at this woman’s church and she was caught in it. Her skin was burned and it will always look like that. I tried to explain to her very simply that there are bad people who hate the people who love Jesus and they do very terrible things to them, even killing them. After all, I reminded her, weren’t there bad men who hated Jesus, hurt Him and hung Him on the cross?
“Yes,” she replied, still staring at the picture in wonder.
I could almost see her little mind working, trying to figure things out. She has been doing that a lot lately. In her Cubbies class at church on Wednesdays there is a little girl who, because of a genetic disorder, does not talk, or play with the other kids, is often in her stroller and is simply different. Emry has been asking about Juliette, trying to understand why she is different, and I have been telling her how God has made Juliette special – just as He makes all of us different and special.
The other night as I was tucking her into bed, Emry asked me who God was. The question reminded me of when I was her age, sitting in church with my mind spinning circles as I tried to figure out who God is and how He came to exist. That’s a question I can answer but certainly not explain. It takes faith to simply accept that God is God. A faith I hope Emry one day has.
Emry’s questions about the lady in the VOM magazine didn’t only relate to the burns on her body and how they came to be. She is very observant and also quickly realized the woman’s eyes were different than her own. She wanted to know how the woman’s eyes came to be shaped like that. I explained people from that area of the world are born with eyes like that, just as her eyes are not narrowed. I tried to think of someone she might know with eyes like that, but she had already been thinking about that.
“Like Asher,” she said, naming a little boy in her Sunday school class who, I believe, is Chinese.
“Yes,” I nodded. “Asher’s parents are from that area of the world, but I think Asher was born in America just like you.”
I wondered where my answer would lead her now, but she was still intent on the picture in the magazine and simply thinking through things. Although the questions she has been asking lately are anything but simple. Even if I can give a simple answer and set aside the major points of theology, persecution, race and birth defects; her questions make me realize how complex the world really is…and I often wonder where her thoughts will take her and what her conclusions will someday be.
But as my friend Allyson reminded me when we were once discussing how much her eldest loves dinosaurs and paleontology but how difficult a science that is for Christians to be educated in when it is swamped with evolution and a complete misunderstanding of the creation of the world: “I can only give my children the Truth. So much of it that I have to trust that when they are faced with a lie, they will simply dismiss it because they know the Truth,” she told me.
And that is what I have to be careful to give my children: the Truth. As God states it in His Word. Not my opinions. Not what is currently popular. Not even a “Biblical world view” which I often feel is our ideas mixed in with God’s Word, a potentially hazardous mix if we’re not careful. Only the Truth. No matter how deep or difficult that can be.
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