There Were 60 Times More US Bomb Strikes Than Terrorist Attacks Last Year

2015 US airstrike, location unknown

2015 Bagdad Hotel terrorist bombing

All of us are sickened by reports of suicide bombings and other acts of senseless terror around the world, a total of 389 in 2015 alone. Most of the untold number of victims are civilians.

What gets less media attention is the number of US bomb, drone and missile strikes in the Middle East and neighboring regions each year, an estimated total of 23,144 in 2015, or nearly sixty times the number of terrorist attacks. While our air strikes are aimed at killing combatants, in a war without conventional battlefields the civilian toll from even the most carefully targeted air raids far exceeds that of the more primitive suicide and car bombing attacks.

Regrettably, the human suffering and destruction that results is the same.

Somewhere we have gotten the idea that violence launched from the ground is more deadly and more evil than violence from the air. But bombs are bombs, whether highly sophisticated or very primitive delivery systems are employed to launch them.

It seems especially ironic that a Nobel Peace Prize winning President should be the commander-in-chief authorizing most of this carnage, which in turn is creating ever more vicious and unconscionable counter-attacks.

Ultimately, violence will never be stopped by violence. We should have learned that by now.

Is MRRJ Investing In Better Health Services? Follow The Money

Middle River Regional Jail

Many of us hoped for a positive response to the Staunton News-Leader's editorial in August, 2015, calling for an independent investigation of the Middle River Regional Jail's medical and other practices. This was followed in December by Channel 29 airing a three-part series investigating the deaths of three inmates whose families allege medical neglect and malpractice.

To add to our hope, the local Daily News-Record recently cited an unsigned and undated report from MRRJ noting a number of positive changes being made in medical services in light of their inmate population having grown from around 350 in 2006 to a current 750.

Unfortunately, their budget numbers fail to support any such change. MRRJ's annual allocation for prescriptions, for example, ($25,000), is exactly the same for 2015-16 as for 2006-07, its first year of operation. Even more puzzling is the fact that in each of four departments (salaries, contracted health services, prescriptions, and medical supplies) they have underspent the money available in their budget by tens of thousands each year.

With the more than $1 million thus "saved" in the last decade, we taxpayers deserve to know what happened to the unspent funds. Why hasn't the budget for medical services doubled with the inmate population? Why has MRRJ's spending per inmate for healthcare consistently been only half of that of most other jails in the area?

Can our Community Criminal Justice Board (which hasn't met since it approved our buy-in of MRRJ over a year ago) help us find an answer? Can the Daily News-Record? Or members of our City Council and/or County Board of Supervisors? 

Someone needs to follow the money.

Prominent ISIL Leader Killed On Good Friday

Abd al-Rahman Mustafa al-Qaduli

According to a statement issued last week by the Defense Department, American forces killed a top Islamic State leader on Good Friday in eastern Syria. An ISIL vehicle carrying Abd al-Rahman Mustafa al-Qaduli, the organization's second in command, was pursued by two special forces helicopters on a road in eastern Syria and totally destroyed.

Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter hailed Mr. Qaduli’s death as another sign that the US-led military strategy for defeating ISI is working. Killing the leaders of a movement is still believed to be the surest way to bring it to an end. 

I couldn't help but think of the irony of this in light of another state-sponsored assassination nearly 2000 years ago, in which the ruling establishment sought to rid the world of someone seen as a threat to what was then the greatest power on earth, the Roman empire. But if there was ever an example of the killing the leader of a movement having an exactly opposite effect, that would be it.

Ancient portrayal of resurrection victory over Rome

The death of Jesus was followed by a miracle resurrection, one that heralded the new birth of a radical movement of peace-promoting, enemy-loving believers that ended in the eventual decline and fall of a once mighty world empire.

Of course, the mission and message of Abd al-Rahman Mustafa al-Qaduli and that of Jesus Christ could hardly be more opposite. One was bent on bringing about God's rule by the use of terror and violence, the other represents a suffering Messiah bringing peace, redemption and the restoration of shalom to a lost and needy world.

May we all lay down our arms, take up our cross and follow him with believers everywhere, confident that his is the only way to a life that endures.

For Good Friday: A Body Bruised and Bloodied

source

"This is my body, broken for you."

A human body has height and weight, flesh and blood, skeleton and skin. It is made up of muscles and tendons, neurons and nerve cells, lungs and lymph nodes, distinctive shades of eye, hair and skin color, pleasure centers and pain receptors, all complex and amazing.

"This is my body, broken for you."

A human body is vulnerable to bruises, lacerations, exhaustion, hunger, concussions, diseases, contusions, hemorrhaging, agonizing pain, thirst, abrasions, fractures, infections, seizures, death.

"This is my body, broken for you."

In his incarnation, Jesus did not come as a disembodied spirit, as one who merely resembled a body, or who simply inhabited one. He "emptied himself" of divine powers and privileges and took on the physicality of the most ordinary of humans, a 'doulos' or slave, one who exists for the service of others.

"This is my body, broken for you."

As Protestants, we have tended to interpret as figurative Jesus's references to the bread and cup of the Last Supper being his very flesh and blood. But should we pay more attention to the Eucharist as God's way of ending the divide between us, as God truly becoming incarnate in us, as Jesus bodily living and reproducing himself through us?

"This is my body, broken for you."

In partaking of the Lord's Supper, we are not only recalling the death of Jesus, but we are celebrating his resurrection. We are experiencing the reality that Jesus lives on in his followers, continues his mission of announcing good news to the poor, of liberating captives and bringing healing and shalom salvation into the world through his reborn people. 

"This is my body, broken for you."

As Servant-Savior, Jesus experiences the full impact of the suffering brought on by the world's violence and evil. And he continues to suffer in the bodies of the world's refugees, those who are lost and lonely, broken and homeless, those experiencing the ravages of famine and disease, all who traumatized and brutalized by war, and all who are victims of state sponsored terrorism as he himself was.

Having endured it all in his broken body, God has declared an end to its evil, offers the world a new life redeemed from it. 

If only we would fully receive God's brokenness, ingest it bodily, and have it become an ongoing part of our own everyday rescued and resurrected lives.

In Love With Life--Our Lovina 1926-2016

photos courtesy of grandson Eldon Yoder

I'll forever remember the evening of March 2, one I spent by my oldest sister Lovina's bed, next to that of her ailing husband Ernest's, in the modest home they had built on their farm near Rustburg in Campbell County.

I had scheduled a flight that was to leave from Roanoke early the next morning for a trip to visit our older brother Sanford and his family in Costa Rica, so I wanted to be sure to be able to see her before I left.

Lovina was one of the more petite members of our family, but with the kind of ready smile and radiant energy that could light up a very large room. She loved life, and had a way of making everyone she met feel welcomed and warmed.

Ernest and Lovina

In late 1947, within a year and a half of our move from Kansas to the Valley, Lovina married her beloved Ernest when she was just short of 20 and he was 21. The two were inseparable partners who celebrated a rare quality of compatibility and camaraderie. Together they raised a family of seven fine children and were blessed with multiple grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Lovina loved them all lavishly, just as she had loved and nurtured all of her eight younger siblings. So I found it way beyond necessary for me to tell her on that last night, in her semi-conscious state from strokes she had suffered just weeks before, how much I loved her and how much I would miss her as my special, special oldest sister.

She and I each inherited our mother's love for reading and our father's love of history, and Lovina spent many hours over many years gathering historical information to add to both the Campbell County and our family's story. I was also influenced by her love of gardening and her delight in all of God's creation, along with her interest in local jail inmates she visited and wrote to.

But words fail me right now. Small as she was in size, to me she will always be larger than life. When I learned upon my arrival in Costa Rica that she had passed, and that I, as well as my aging older brother, would not be able to attend her funeral, I felt both a sense of great loss and a sense of a great blessing that I will always carry with me.

I would like to become more like her, and to one day die as she did, with mission accomplished and surrounded by God's grace and her family's love.

What If Our Correctional System Could Operate More Like Our Healthcare System?

Rockingham/Harrisonburg Regional Jail

Augusta Health, main entrance

My oldest living sister was taken by ambulance to Augusta Health last week with extreme fatigue and difficulty breathing. After being treated in the Emergency Room she was assigned to the Intensive Care Unit, where she was put on oxygen and given round the clock attention. Within a day she was found to have a 90% blockage in one of the arteries to her heart, resulting in her having a stint installed.

From the first we had conversations with her medical staff as to what would be the best treatment for her condition, with the goal being to get her returned home and being able to resume a normal, productive life as soon as possible. Currently she is assigned to spend 7-8 days in the skilled nursing department at the hospital, where she will have various therapies to help her regain her heart and body strength to return home sometime next week, where she will be provided needed assistance from others in her family and church family.

As always, I was impressed with the professional staff and state of the art facilities at Augusta Health, providing treatment based on the most updated medical research available.

By contrast, our nation's "correctional" facilities are operated in pretty much the same medieval manner they were centuries ago, when we first came up with the idea of locking people in steel cages in order to have them learn penitence and to change their ways (hence the origin of the term "penitentiary").

Last week a friend told me about how one of his neighbors had just been returned to jail for numerous technical and traffic violations resulting from his seeming inability to understand and/or remember what is necessary to keep himself compliant with the law. In this case he had understood the clerk of the court to say he would be OK if he paid $50 a month on his past fines, and he apparently didn't understand that his license remained suspended in the meantime.

I'm certainly not defending his lifestyle patterns, even though he is one of a most generous, caring individuals one can find anywhere, innocent and naive to a fault. As a part of his naivete, he is terrible at keeping up with what he experiences as a complex, sticky web of laws and probation rules that keep getting him in trouble with the court. 

Meanwhile, you and I are left with the bill for his incarceration (well over $2000 a month), and are denied the benefit of his being a contributing and tax paying member of our community until he finally has his case heard over a month from now. 

Our criminal justice system all too frequently resorts to sentencing people to some arbitrarily determined amount of time in a correctional "hospital" such as a jail or prison. Invariably these facilities are understaffed and overcrowded and with few opportunities for remedial experiences that actually "correct", and often resulting in inmates losing their jobs due to having to be away from work for weeks on end while awaiting trial. Whether the offense is murder, burglary, embezzlement, the use of illegal drugs, or any number of failures to pay fines, court costs or child support, the eventual "remedy" tends to be the same, with varying amounts of time spent behind bars, idle and without any significant "treatment".

Imagine our chagrin if the following occurred in our healthcare system:

Tooth decay due to lack of good dental hygiene? Two days in an antiquated hospital.

Recurring headaches due to hangovers? More days in the same kind of hospital.

Digestive problems due to poor eating habits? Even more days in the hospital.

Lung cancer due to smoking? A life sentence in the hospital, etc.

You get my point. Any one-remedy-fits-all mindset would obviously result in a very expensive, overburdened and inefficient healthcare system. 

We can create a criminal justice system that is far superior to that, based on best practices proven to help offenders return to their communities in the shortest time possible as rehabilitated, productive citizens.

There Is Only One Truth

Vulcan Arenal from the plaza in La Fortuna in Costa Rica

Every new denomination or offshoot of one seems to believe they have the truth all figured out. So does that mean there are many different "truths", or is there only one?

I once heard Bishop Martin Lehman say he believed there was only one ultimate truth, but that none of us has the ability to fully perceive it, define it, to see it all as it truly is in this life. He compares it to our inability to accurately describe the make-up of a mountain in the far distance toward which we are moving. The closer we get to this beautiful "mountain" representing our sacred texts, the life and teachings of Jesus and of all of our spiritual ancestors, the more details we may comprehend, but we will never see it as it really is until we finally arrive. And even then, it would require an eternity of exploration to truly know all there is to know about something so majestic and vast as God's ultimate truth.

Our human tendency is to think that as soon as we receive some new revelation of it based on our coming around some next bend in our journey, that we have somehow arrived. So we tend to halt our journey, codify the insight we've gained and build institutions and write creeds to perpetrate it. Like the disciples who had an epiphany of a transfigured Jesus, we want to build three tabernacles to celebrate our latest insight.

In light of this metaphor, I'm fascinated by the photo I took recently while visiting in Costa Rica. I didn't take it with this in mind, but see it as a reminder that not only can our pursuit of earthly possessions (nice cars, for example) get in the way of our journey toward the "mountain" we seek, but the institution of the church itself can sometimes block our progress, rather than it being a wayside inn and a source of encouragement and much needed direction on our way toward truth.

Early Anabaptists tended to write occasionally updated "confessions of faith" rather than "creeds" meant to define the faith for all time.  Yet their Mennonite and other spiritual descendants have become as prone as other Christian groups to divide and subdivide over differing understandings of it.

How much better to be humble and realistic about how little we fully know, and to recognize that in this life we can only "know in part and prophesy in part" and "see through a glass darkly"? How much better to acknowledge that it will not be until the next life that we will finally see "face to face" and "know as we are known"?

Interestingly, these phrases come from the so-called "love chapter" in the New Testament, one that that tells us that greatest "truth" of all is the knowledge and practice of a love that is never boastful or proud, but is always about being forbearing and patiently persevering in all of our relationships with others.

The chapter ends with the words, "Now abide faith, hope and love, but the greatest of these is love."

That's the kind of truth I most want to remember.