We Remember

My AP class is studying Hitler's propaganda ministry and the Holocaust in conjunction with a reading of Elie Wiesel's autobiography, Night. It's a heartrending story of this 15 year old Jewish boy's survival of Auschwitz. Wiesel is an incredible man. Since being liberated by American troops in 1945, he has written and published 47 books, holds several degrees (some of which are honorary), has taught at Boston University and Yale, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, and at the age of 82 is still alive today, shouting from the rooftops, doing all he can to ensure that the memories of so many dead will live on.

Tomorrow (assuming that the meteorologists are crazy for predicting that the blizzard of the century will arrive just after midnight) my students will watch Oprah's 2006 interview with Wiesel. This is an incredible viewing. They actually visit Auschwitz (which apparently Wiesel does on a regular basis -- Can you imagine?) over 50 years after the fact, and as if the feeling of the place isn't intense enough, he refuses to speak above a whisper in order to respect the dead.

While doing this study along with my kids, I have been moved to tears several times. This is a tragedy of mammoth proportions that no one should ever have the luxury to forget. Here in the midst of my rambling, I'm reminded of Elie Wiesel's declaration that there simply are no words. No words to describe the horror and anger and grief. No words. So here, at the risk of alluding to Thomas Bowden's "This page is left blank for you" at the end of Beebe High School yearbooks, I'm going to leave the rest of this post blank for the memories of the dead and the grief of the living. May those six million descendants of Abraham never be forgotten.

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Evening the playing field

This post is a collection (loosely defined) of thoughts that emerged from our Sunday morning class discussion and flared up again during the reading of Ellen's latest post. There has been a lot of talk in my social circles lately about the unchanging nature of God in light of the seemingly contradictory nature of the Old and New Testaments. Because you can read some interesting thoughts on that specific topic at the link above, I'm choosing to ramble on about the implications of this discussion. I like to spend time thinking about what it is I truly believe and how those beliefs ought to affect my everyday life. I'm often pretty terrible at blending all the compartments of my life together, so it's good for me to think about how my life would look if God seamlessly flowed through all the cubicle walls. I'm getting to the point sometime soon, I promise.

So, if I am to truly believe that God is the same "yesterday, today, and forever," what does that mean for my life? Well, I think that there are several important implications, but the one that I keep thinking about is an increase in humility and tolerance. If the God of the Old Testament is still the same God who I serve today, then His Law is and was perfect. It was not the spiritual Articles of Confederation, but rather it was the keyhole view of God's heart that he was working on revealing a little at a time.

If I believe that His Law is perfect, I will have more respect, not only for those words, but also for the people they were written for. As a body of believers, we generally see modern-day Jews as those poor people who missed the boat. Their religion was abolished with the death and resurrection of the savior we worship, and -- all too often we think that-- they were just too narrow-minded to realize it.

The Jewish people are the generations of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They are the people who God set his heart on and spend hundreds of years yearning for, receiving unto himself, losing to idols, punishing, and reconciling with. Our perfect, gracious, and merciful God first bestowed His grace and mercy on the people of Israel.

I am by no means saying that we, as Christians, should embrace Judaism. I wholeheartedly believe in the resurrected Son of God and choose to be loyal to him always. (Besides, the Jerusalem Council decided I didn't have to in Acts 15.) I am only asserting that we realize the special place our own loving God gave to Israel and learn to be more tolerant and loving toward them as the beloved people of God.

What do you think? How is your life different when you live as though you serve an unchanging God?