Commentary by Brett Younger: Encountering Evil_71105

Posted: 7/11/05

COMMENTARY:
Encountering Evil

By Brett Younger

On Thursday morning, July 7, my family boarded the Eurostar, the train that goes under the English Channel, in Paris. Onboard, we planned our last day in England—the underground to the hotel, Madame Tussaud’s, and The Lion King. An hour before we were to arrive, cell phones started ringing. People all over the train were whispering anxiously—in French. My wife, Carol, asked the woman across from her to explain, but all we could understand was “le bomb.”

When we got to London, the scene was surreal. Police went through our train looking for a passenger who had made a suspicious phone call. Before they let us leave, they explained that several bombs had gone off in the subways. Sirens were blaring. Ambulances were tearing past. One rumor was that 200 people were already dead. In the chaos and confusion, emergency officials had no advice as to where we should go or what we should do. The underground and buses were shut down.

We walked to a hotel, where we were told that the nearest vacancies were 30 miles away. We joined a bizarre exodus of tens of thousands of frightened refugees walking out of the city. After wandering for awhile, we were lucky to get to share a taxi to the airport with a Nigerian financier who kept saying, “This is a very bad day.” The cab driver insisted: “It had to happen. We knew it was coming.”

We listened in silence to the horrible news on the radio. Traffic wasn’t moving, so we had a long time to hear the stories and imagine the horror. People were calling in to tell of wounded victims staggering out of the darkness of the tube stations gasping for breath. People were screaming: “We are dying in here! Help us!”

When his subway station was closed, one man chose to take the No. 30 bus and then was injured in the explosion that sheared off the top half of the bus. Shards of glass and metal splattered across the road. People dripped with blood. Doctors rushed from victim to victim. Wives cried for their missing husbands. Strangers hugged.

That night on the news and the next morning in the papers there were, of course, politicians trying to make themselves look good—“We will not be intimidated!”—but reactions also included eloquent words of sorrow, compassion and courage.

Ken Livingstone, mayor of London, spoke movingly of the tragedy: “This was not a terrorist attack against the mighty or the powerful. It is not aimed at presidents or prime ministers. It was aimed at ordinary working-class Londoners.”

The archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, was concerned about violence against Muslims: “I have spent this morning with Muslim friends, and we’re all as one in our condemnation of this evil and in our shared sense of care and compassion of those affected in whatever way.”

Robert Fisk, a columnist for The Independent, was one of many who courageously questioned how to respond to hate: “It is easy for Tony Blair to call yesterday’s bombings ‘barbaric’—of course, they were—but what were the civilian deaths of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the children torn apart by cluster bombs? When they die, it is ‘collateral damage’ when ‘we’ die, it is ‘barbaric terrorism.’”

Sorrow, compassion and courage are the responses to which God calls us when we encounter unthinkable evil. I still feel overwhelmed with sadness at what happened in London, but I am partially grateful that I was there. When I read about the terror that grips much of our world, it won’t seem quite so far away. I pray that I will feel more of the sorrow, compassion and courage that God feels.

Brett Younger is senior pastor of Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas.