Since It All Began

As of this writing, the number of dead has climbed to over 300. I pray there are no more, I fear there will be. It's not as though I haven't heard of the bombings in Sri Lanka, I just didn't have anything new to add. I’d rather just sit and let the sadness wash over me, pray for the families of those whose lives were taken from them, and contemplate the world we are living in, then be an echo of an echo.

For two thousand years, Christians have been brutalized, martyred, slaughtered, and murdered. The only thing that has changed over the course of two millennia is that you can kill a lot more people with a lot less effort today than you could two thousand years ago.

It would take an entire Roman legion to make 300 crosses, and nail three hundred Christians to them. In Sri Lanka, it took eight determined people. The means of our demise may have changed over the centuries, but the underlying motivation has not. 

Christians are no longer being fed to lions, made to fight wild beasts, dipped in tar and lit aflame come dusk. Instead, they are being massacred in their houses of worship, turned into mincemeat and bone fragments with the press of a button.

Yes, the means have changed, but the motivation is still hate. The motivation is still an all-consuming desire to destroy Christianity by any means necessary. How much hate must one have in their heart for his fellow man to be willing to die in order to maim and murder others?

We are seeing the fable of the scorpion and the turtle play out in real life, wherein even though the scorpion knows it too will die if it stings the turtle midway across the pond, its sense of self-preservation is overridden by its nature. Yes, the scorpion could have survived, but to do so he would have had to let the turtle live as well, and his nature just could not abide that.

Cheetahs don’t change their spots, zebras don’t change their stripes, and some ideologies will never fully embrace the 21^st century because their nihilistic nature is antithetical to coexistence. When the only three options one’s holy books give for the rest of humanity is to either convert, die, or be subjugated, there really isn’t much room for dialogue. The only one that comes close to peaceful coexistence is the subjugation. I don't know about you, but if I could help it, I'd rather not be the subject of a death cult that finds strapping a brick of C-4 to a twelve-year-old and sending them out to play in the park with the infidels an honorable and praiseworthy thing.

There was nothing coincidental about the date of these attacks, or the locations wherein they were carried out. They were methodically thought out not only to cause mass casualties but to leave an open wound remembered every year for decades to come. They were intended to shake men’s faith. They were intended to make men question where God was in all the carnage.

And that's the one thing the death cultists, and their acolytes will never understand about Christians and Christianity. We do not live for God in the hope of getting seventy virgins somewhere down the line if we're willing to get our hands bloody and forfeit our humanity.

Yes, future glory is baked into the cake, but what sets Christianity apart is that we feel the presence of our God in the present. We are not promised the prize at the bottom of a cracker jack box only once we’ve died in jihad, and not a moment before. Our God is with us now. We feel His presence now. We know His love now, and one day we will see Him face to face as we are welcomed into His Kingdom. His peace, His joy, His lovingkindness, are all things we experience in the present, and this is why we will continue to carry on as we have for the last two millennia.

May God comfort the mourning. 

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea Jr.