The Afflicted

God will deliver the needy who cry out, the afflicted who have no one to help them. Psalm 72:12

This blog is invaluable because it will teach you exactly what not to read when you cannot sleep because you are worried about the son still trapped at college by impassable roads. Doing the insomnia waltz for a few hours, I turned to my bedside book to help calm my maternal hyperdrive. The cheery little tome I was just starting was Exodus, by Leon Uris. I usually oscillate between books like Uris'- that deal with issues like the Holocaust, and Carol Nelson Douglas with the disturbing issues of talking cats and dogs that solve crimes. This sleepless eve, I began to read a first person account of someone's relatives being made into soap by a country that called itself Christian. It described babies being tossed in the air and used for target practice. I will stop there. Everyone, unless you are an Iranian president, knows about the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust.
I got out of bed and paced a little, thinking that some of those victims were my relatives. It could have been my mother, my brother, my sister being led to the slaughter no one believed could happen. I was trembling with the rage and reawakened realization that even after millions were being herded to gas chambers and gruesome torture, a world still said, "It could not happen. It is only a rumor. Evil that huge cannot exist."
And then Uris describes the period right after the Holocaust, which is another despairing testament to the disgusting levels our species can descend. The skeletal orphans, and barely alive "survivors" of the concentration camps were herded into barbed wire enclosed "refugee camps", with little food and dismal conditions, because no one wanted them. Trickles of Jewish people were allowed to emigrate to Palestine, but the Arab world didn't want them either. So they escaped as best they could to the only potential refuge they knew in Palestine.
I haven't reached the section of Exodus yet where Israel becomes a nation and its doors are opened to this wretched mass of suffering. I just could not read any more.
I know that our nation is negotiating with Israel, a country the size of New Jersey, to coerce her to give up more land of this one place of refuge for her perpetually afflicted people. Arab leaders that surround her call for her utter destruction, and the world stands by as they manufacture the capability to do so.
But we know it could not happen. Evil that huge cannot exist.
I had a screaming nightmare in the middle of the night. What a surprise, huh? In the nightmare, the loved ones around me were all metastisizing into monsters and as I turned to them for help, they became the evil pursuer.
I know one of the hardest questions to try to answer is how could a loving God allow evil to exist, especially evil on the scale of the holocaust? And where was He when those children were being ripped from their mothers by tormentors too hideous for us to even imagine? Corrie Ten Boom, in her book The Hiding Place, answers that, as best as anyone I have ever read. God was in the fleas. The one room where Corrie and her sister and other terrified victims of the concentration camps could gather undisturbed and pray and read of the eternal promise of God was so filled with fleas that the guards would not enter the room.
I cannot answer that question of evil. The best I can do is propose that without the creation of choice, a choice to be evil instead of good, we cannot understand good. If we cannot face the monstrous capacity of our own hearts, we cannot crave or desire its opposite. It is for now, the best I can do with that question. In all the horrors of the Holocaust, God was the only source of comfort and strength for Corrie Ten Boom, and I believe she has the right to preach it.
At least, it made my worry over Matt getting home for Christmas pale in comparison.