Watermark Justice

I recently skimmed through Gary Haugen’s ‘Good News About Injustice’ to supplement my prayer and preparation for Friday’s Watermark Justice trip to Goma, DR Congo.  A few years ago, the book played a role in pushing me to take my first justice trip to India and ultimately helped bring me back to Christ.  The great news Haugen reports in ‘Good News’ is that we worship a God of justice, compassion, moral clarity, and rescue.  It really hit home when Haugen and later other Christian lawyers showed me verse after verse regarding the importance of justice to God.

One particular paragraph in ‘Good News’ challenged me to get in the game.  In Chapter One, titled Rage in Rwanda: A Suburban Christian Confronts Genocide, Haugen wrote of his journey to Kibuye, Rwanda, where he was to lead the United Nation’s investigation of the Rwandan genocide.  His orders were to exhume mass graves of, in Haugen’s words, “nameless, faceless, decaying” bodies of men, women and children.  According to Haugen, it was easier simply to think of them as nothing more than a “tragic mass.”  However, despite his best efforts to depersonalize the investigation to get the job done, “a painful glimpse of the truth always came through.” He added this sobering conclusion regarding the bodies found in Kibuye:

“This was not an undifferentiated mass of lifeless clods on the inevitable dust heap of a fallen world.  In truth each body, now dull and limp in the mud, was a unique bearer of the very image of God, a unique creation of the divine Maker, individually knit within a mother’s womb by the Lord of the universe.  For as difficult as it is to imagine, each crumpled mortal frame had indeed come from a mother, one single mother who somewhere in time wept tears of joy and aspiration over her precious child–a child endowed with the mysterious spark of Adam and an immortal soul.  We would never number all of the mother’s children in these mass graves, but their Father in heaven had numbered even the very hairs on their heads.”

The first time I read that paragraph my newborn son was sleeping across the hall.  I was in the midst of learning just how much a father can love a son.  Understanding that God loves each of us so much more than we can comprehend, and that He loves each individual amongst the suffering masses – those purportedly without hope – as much as he loves my little boy began to change my mindset.  These suffering people separately and individually matter to God as much as my child matters to Him.  Cf. Psalm 139; Genesis 1:26-27.

This revelation, however, is only part of the equation.  God often challenges us to imagine ourselves in the shoes of another.  Jesus tells us in Matthew 22: 37-40:

. . .“’[l]ove the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all of your mind.’  This is the first and greatest commandment.  And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”  (emphasis added)

In Hebrews 13:3, we are instructed to “[r]emember . . . those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering.” We then must proactively love and help the afflicted.  We are to “[s]eek justice, encourage the oppressed . . . [d]efend the cause of the fatherless [and] plead the case of the widow.”  Isaiah 1:17.

Haugen’s reflections regarding the Kibuye massacre have universal application.  Go back and review the quoted paragraph from ‘Good News,’ but interchange the innocent folks of Kibuye with rape victims in the DR Congo or children raised in the relentless cycle of poverty and despair in West Dallas.  The Biblical conclusion remains the same: we are to recognize that God overflows with love for all of us, we are to love our neighbors, and we are to seek God’s justice for His children.

These are some of the many reasons why the Shelter Goma women leave their families, jobs, and the security of North Dallas to travel across the globe to share their stories and love on those suffering pain I cannot imagine.  These are some of the reasons why a busy lawyer like Rick Howard leaves his wife and three boys (and coaching duties for three baseball teams) to talk openly and honestly with Congolese colleagues about accountability, self-leadership, and Christ’s love.

Please pray for the team’s safety, but also pray that God uses us to touch hearts and minds of those we meet so they may find faith in the God of justice, compassion, moral clarity, and rescue.

For more details regarding the March 2010 Goma, Congo trip, please read: http://watermarkblogs.org/justice/2010/03/03/march-2010-goma-congo-trip/