How It Feels

These words are not my own, but they are penned as if they could have been. I cannot think of a better way to express myself, especially now, than these words...


I remember coming home from the killing fields of Rwanda and feeling a bit wounded by friends who seemed to have no interest in trying to understand where I had been and what I had seen. I doubt that I ever mentioned this to any of them. But I felt something of the shallowness of some of my friendships when, coming back fresh from an eye-witness experience of one of the most appalling events in human history, they did not express even ten minutes of curiosity about what I had seen. Given how unpleasant it all was, I really didn't blame them for their lack of inquiry. In fact, most of the time I didn't like talking about it very much.

But those closest relatives and friends who really wanted to know me wouldn't let me get away with keeping the experience to myself. They wanted to understand where I had been, what I had seen and how I had been touched. They knew that they could never understand the deepest part of me if they didn't have some understanding of the things I had seen.

Likewise if we really want to know God, we should know something about where he has been - and what it has been like for him to suffer with all those who are hurting and abused. No one will ever really know what it was like for me to interview all those orphaned massacre survivors in Rwanda or roll back a corpse in a Rwandan church and find the tiniest of skeletons under the remains of a mother who had tried to protect her baby with her own body. I would never expect people to totally understand. God doesn't expect this either. He knows that we can never comprehend the smallest fraction of the oppression and abuse he has had to witness. But we can know him better if we try to understand something about his character and experience as the God of compassion - the God who suffers with the victims of injustice.

If nothing else, it will help us understand why the God of justice hates injustice and wants it to stop. If we had to see it and hear it every day like our God does, we would hate it too. To understand where the God of compassion has been is to begin to understand God's passion for justice. Justice, for our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, is not a good idea, a noble aspiration, a theoretical satisfaction or an impersonal principle - it is his beating heart. He is the "man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering," who weeps with those who weep (Isaiah 53:3; John 11:33-35).

God's compassion for the victims of injustice extends to all people, all round the world, without distinction or favor. When it comes to loving the people of the world, God suffers under none of our limitations. He doesn't feel so limited in his resources of compassion that he must establish boundaries for his caring or hierarchies of people, races, communities or nations to love. Rather, as the psalmist writes, "The Lord works righteousness and justice for all the oppressed" (Psalm 103:6). Indeed God seeks to establish justice "to save all the afflicted of the land (Psalm 76:9).

-Gary Haugen
The Good News About Injustice