A Desperate Fragility

I wept last night.
               
                       Shook...felt...hurt. 

"Tae Guk Gi" is a film that depicts the Korean War, also known as the "Forgotten War" of 1950-1953.
                     
                            I'm not Korean.

                                                                But I hurt.

I hurt for a people forced to war against itself because of ideologies they barely understood.  I wept for a people who, at some point, somewhere, stopped looking each other in the eyes, stopped recognizing their own flesh and blood.  I shook.

                                                    Not just for those in the Korean War.

But for Ming, who survived the Cambodian war after experiencing the murder of her family.  And for Bu, who tries to forget the decade in a refuge camp, and the horrors of the Khmer rouge, by drinking memories away.  For Sar Aung, a dear friend who fled on foot from a forced labor camp in Burma, which holds the longest ongoing civil war in the world to date.  For every human being, tucked away in our history books as a mere statistic, overlooked, unseen, invisible.

I wept.  For the war that goes on in our streets in urban America, and the complex realities that keep us from recognizing one another.  And for the frailty of the human heart - yours, mine - that so easily mistakes a brother and a sister for an enemy, because of the stories that surround us.  I wept, because there are no easy answers.

What if we began to see each other?

What if we began to hear the common beating pulse, recognize the flesh and blood of every human being, in every skin color, language, culture, lifestyle, ideology.

         When will we begin to recognize... that our lives hold the same desperate fragility.

                                  May Your Kingdom Come.
                                                            God, please. 

                                                        Make Your Kingdom Come.    

---
Thank you to my dear friend Alison, who shared her heart for the South Korea, North Korea conflict with me. And shares a longing for peace and reconciliation, and a longing for the coming of the Kingdom of God.