One of the biggest reasons I went to DR Congo was to see and hear, first-hand, if what I have been reading about in the western press matched with reality...
- terrified families
- brutalized women
- murdered men
- abused and abandoned children
The stories I have been told, by mothers and fathers and kids I've spoken with, and the pastors who are trying to comfort and assist them...
they are ugly, and vile, and nasty stories of man's inhumanity to man, of unceasing tribal conflict, of the basest of human treatment by fellow human beings.
If you look and listen inside every tent, every shelter, every tarp lean-to...you hear the most sad and sickening stories of a nation torn apart by war...war that is so complex and yet so basically simple that it is staggeringly difficult to wrap my mind around...so I just listen...and pray for the kind of discernment offered by the Lord in James chapter 1.
And look at the thousands of displaced families...
And the little children who should be singing... and playing... and going to school, but instead they are stuck in this hell of a survival existence.
This is their home...this is their village...this is their marketplace...this is their school...this is their church...this is their clinic...this is their security...this is their existence...for how long?Only God knows.
