One shirt for one back

My friend has been involved in Rwanda, both with mission work and in trying to help people develop trades and small businesses. This was the country that in 1994 saw nearly 1,000,000 slaughtered in tribal violence, though it got less media attention in the U.S. than the Nancy Kerrigan/Tonya Harding saga, Lorena Bobbitt's sharp-edged revenge, or Kurt Cobain's suicide. As Stalin not only quipped, but could testify to first-hand: "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic."

My friend passed along to me some news items about large-scale efforts by churches and government agencies to promote reconciliation and education. This got me to thinking about the dyadic nature of reconciliation -- the reality that while large organizations can sponsor educational lectures and conferences and committees, there is only violence when one man strikes down another, and hence only reconciliation when a man can look at someone who was once his enemy and not want to spill his blood.

That isn't to belittle the efforts by people like Rick Warren, whose Saddleback Church has a major initiative in Rwanda. It's to underscore, instead, the hopelessness of man's efforts to change the nature of himself. Men butcher one another by the millions with ease, but how much effort must it take not to kill those who have killed ones you love? Violence is a conflagration, but peace, it seems, is the slow mending of a single heart at a time. We should thank God that He is the surgeon, and not we.

My friend also directed me to this video of a trip he and some others took with Christian artist Sara Groves to Rwanda. I'm struck by his simple, faithful, seemingly hopeless act of love: one man giving another his shirt, as if a single shirt can erase the terror and suffering, as if a single shirt can heal the heart of man.

It can't, but by the grace of God, maybe it can become more than just one shirt on one scarred back. We don't know, do we? But we give our shirts nonetheless, those among us faithful enough to believe in lost causes. It's certainly not enough, in a place where one million souls cry out from the dirt. But maybe that's how God works, and has always worked, by taking the futile gestures of faithful men and fashioning them into great, grace-filled things.