Three days ago, sometime
on the 30 April, rebel troops under the command of former Congolese army
general Bosco “Terminator” Ntaganda, marched upon the villages surrounding
Goma, a large city in north-eastern Congo. The Kivu region of the Democratic
Republic of Congo, in which Goma is the largest city, has played host to a
dozen or more wars in only the last couple of decades and boasts history’s
largest refugee camps, some numbering more than 1.5 million people. At the
hands of warlords and forces descending upon Congo’s communities like starved
locusts, the people of Kivu and its surrounding villages have become some of
the poorest in the world. A billion people worldwide live on less than $1 a
day; in Goma countless families live on less than $1 a week. In such an environment
in which healthcare is so essential, it is missing; sanitation is simply not a
facet of life. Every man, woman and child in Goma knows too familiarly the
sound that heralds their exodus: marching on the mountains, gunfire in the
hills, screaming in the homes. They know what it means to decide between
fleeing into the bush with children slung over their back, where they will have
no food, water, shelter or security, or staying where they are and waiting for the
soldiers to arrive, young men with Kalashnikovs in hand, whose only wage is as
much food as they can pillage, as many women as they can get their hands on. The
troops always invade the villages first. This is life in Goma.
And so, when we hear
that the soldiers are marching again, again, what are we to do? From the beautiful
farmhouse in which I find myself in Zambia, gathered together with all my Hands
at Work family for a time of celebration and thanking God and discovering His
vision for what is next, what am I to do? It is difficult even to pray. But
then, such are the occasions when prayer is most important. When it seems so
trite as to be even a joke. This thing we do before we throw the first forkful
of dinner into our mouths, and do more earnestly with clenched fists before an
exam or interview, this thing we fall asleep doing as we lay our heads down at
night, are we really to do that now? 1,000 kilometres away in Zambia, or
3,000 kilometres away in Europe, or 6,000 kilometres away in North America,
what more can we do?
How deserted lies the city, once so full of people. Her children have
gone into exile, captive before the foe. Our pursuers were swifter than eagles
in the sky; they chased us over the mountains and lay in wait for us in the
desert. Those who pursue us are at our heels; we are weary and find no rest.
- Lamentations -
Sometimes a broken heart
isn’t enough. Walking amidst the smouldering ruins of the once great city he
called home, the poet of Lamentations “pours out” his heart upon the ground. Broken,
beat, smashed into little more than a puddle on the floor. A prayer like the
one above rises from the devastation of a heart as spent as his. He can do no
other. My heart is utterly sold out for the Congo. That’s no secret. When I
heard about Goma, standing in our Zambian farmhouse as my friend recounts the
news he has just received from one of our guys in Congo, I can only describe
what I felt as something akin to getting a phone call telling you that your
home has been hit by a bomb. And what could I do? Only pray, and pray more. I
slept outside that night, because sometimes words aren’t as articulate a prayer
as the actions that follow them, and it seemed wrong to crawl under my mosquito
net into bed as I finish praying for the safety of thousands sleeping in the
bush. I even had the audacity to be a little frightened of some of the sounds
filling the night, birds and other unrecognisable animal calls. I was scared
because I didn’t know which animals were making the noise. Gunfire is much more
distinguishable a sound. And so this is me doing the little more that I can do:
asking you to pray also. Even if you're not the kind of person to pray much or at all.
Some things are more important than the theological standpoint in which you
find yourself in this very moment. Please pray. We can do little more. And as
you pray know that God has designs and dreams and visions and promises for
Goma, that long forgotten city in some abstract corner of the African jungle. If
you don’t know that, then your prayers will go little further than asking God
how in His name or in the name of fate or destiny or bad luck or anything else something
like this could happen in a world that for all intents and purposes would actually
be pretty much perfect were it not for that great slip-up of His in making a
creature with the capacity to ruin the place in ways so horrifying as to be unimaginable.
Praying like that won’t get you or the children lost in the hills of Goma
anywhere. That’s how my prayers seem to always start these days. But that mustn’t
be where they end. Wading in an ocean of hearts unreservedly poured out for these children, these
women, many of them pregnant, these grandfathers and grandmothers too tired to
run again, let us take our lead from the poet, his heart wasted before him on
the ground:
I remember my affliction and my wandering
the bitterness and the fall,
I well remember them,
and my soul is downcast within me.
Yet this I call to mind
and therefore I have hope:
Because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed
for his compassions never fail.
- Lamentations -
