I have been sitting here this morning sewing my sons badges on a blanket for camp, just as my Mother had done for me. On the telly I have been watching a docudrama about 7/7. The programme is just on in the back round but it is enough to make me think. I remember to, this day and what I was doing that day. I had our young baby and small toddler at home, I sat down with a cup of tea and put on the news. I texted my husband at work in Durham and then in turn checking all our family were safe in London. But what if I had not had an answer, what if the phone had been silent. It is a thought that none of us want to have and an experience no one should ever have to experience. Sewing these badges on, stitch by stitch keeping our family together both past and present, I don't want to go there. I can not even begin to imagine or feel what it might be like. Yet this grief that is not mine and these events I did not live through are making me cry. So many questions, why did they, how could they? Will we ever learn? What causes such hatred? They are questions none of us can answer, but that we all ask.
Not quite ten years on from this atrocity we all stood and prayed for more victims, of yet more terrorism. At precisely midday last Friday, when I was in Leeds. The city stopped. The bell from the clock tower echoed around the buildings as we all stood remembering.
When these atrocities happen, we are drawn together, almost pulled together like magnets. The hatred and fear that causes these massacres of human life, always end in love. Those of us that are left, answer with love, courage and bravery.
These incidents happen so infrequently here. In other countries they happen almost daily. People's lives are lived constantly in fear. They have no strong army force or world class police force to protect them from 95% of the terror that could come their way. They watch friends and family blown to pieces. Fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, raped, beheaded and tortured. We are losing hundreds of young people to these countries to be radicalised and commit these atrocities to others.
We don't have the answers. However many people we stop or destroy or imprison, evil will still exist. While there is free will, some humans will always chose evil. It is the inevitability of the human condition, we are all unique therefore we are all different and will take a different approach to morality. What we can do as Christians though is show the world is not all bleak. We can answer the hate with love. We can bring compassion into daily turmoil. We can bring peace into anarchy. Even if we touch just one life, we change the whole of their world. If we can do just that we have made a difference and that person will take that out with them. Remember it, talk of it and maybe show others a bit of Christ's love too.
We can be the beacon of light in the darkest of places because we are part of the light that conquered all that is dark and evil.
