JCK-at-large SITE

When a student walks out of High School and is swarmed by a gang of ten, you intervene.  Not because you know there is no loaded gun in the crowd.  But out of moral outrage.  And because your intervention is close to the heart of God, He infuses what you do with dunamis energy.  It’s the cleansing of the temple.

Same story with other heavy handed brutalities, including the war in Ukraine.  “Just watching” can hardly be the right response. So writes an observer from the peaceful Silicon Valley, USA.  Randy Smith (Staunton News Leader, Apr 13, 2022) could treat the conflict like “somebody else’s problem” if anyone could:

“Out here in the Valley,” he writes, “I was looking at the recent satellite images of that eight-mile long Russian military convoy traveling in eastern Ukraine and thought, what’s wrong with this picture?  What’s wrong is all we’re doing is watching it. That’s it…. 

“The Bucha massacre. The missile strike on the Kramatorsk train station. The leveling of Mariupol. The UNHCR estimate that one quarter of the entire population of Ukraine has either fled Ukraine or been displaced. [Yet] none of these events has moved the dial of the U.S. and NATO… assistance.”

Smith concludes with a question: “Is it time for NATO as a whole, or as a coalition of the willing, to end the heartbreaking suffering in Ukraine?”

No doubt we live in a very complex world. I’ve never had to defend a city.  I’ve never had to put my army boots on the ground to stop an invasion. I’ve never had to prepare for missile attacks.  

But I know the rules of the schoolyard very well.  Bullies are stopped in their tracks by a good strong jab to the solar plexus.