Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Healing Hearts Banquet Speech - Isaiah 30:18; 32:14-20


Healing Heart Banquet Speech
September 2, 2000

In the Holy Bible
From the Prophet Isaiah come the following words:

The Lord longs to be gracious to you;
He rises to show you compassion.
For the Lord is a God of justice.
Blessed are all who wait for him!
The fortress and the watchtower will become a wasteland
Until the Spirit of God is poured out on us from on high,
and the desert becomes a fertile field,
and the fertile field seems like a forest.
Justice will dwell in the desert
And righteousness live in the fertile field.
The fruit of righteousness will be
Quietness and confidence forever.

My people will live in peaceful dwelling places,
in secure homes,
in undisturbed places of rest.

Though hail flatten the forest
and the city is leveled completely,
how blessed you will be,
sowing your seed by every stream,
and letting your cattle and donkeys range free.
[excerpts from Isaiah 30:18, 32:14-20 NIV]

As I speak about Healing Hearts tonight, these words are the picture I see.
In Shala, in the will of God, may these words become true for each of you and for every country, people, and culture represented here today.

Deputy Minister, Zivalj,
Ambassadors Davidovic, Vasilj, and Sacirbey,
Counsel General,
Minister Counselors,
Mr. First Secretary,

Please pardon my impertinence and presumption to speak in the presence of such distinguished and knowledgeable guests.

Imam Agic,
Mr. Saban Torlo
Ms. Alma Ovcina
Mr. Mensur Sunje
Mr. Mujko Erovic

My other unnamed dignitaries, heads of organizations, business giants, guests, friends, and sponsors from the expatriate Bosnian community and the expatriates of the other lands of the former Yugoslavia and the world, please forgive me if I speak from my limited resettlement perspective and that of my own religious convictions. You, each person in attendance, represent experiences, traditions, religions, cultures, and knowledge that I am not qualified to address.
But to tonight, I want to speak to something that I pray is very dear to each of your hearts as a human being despite any national, political, religious, or cultural label you or I wear - the need and process of Healing Hearts. By the grace of God, all wise, eternal, and above us all, and as the leader and therefore a predominant influence in World Relief - Chicago, I simply want to speak my heart.

I open my heart to you like a book.
What you hear is water drawn from deep within the well which is my own inner being. I trust you will find within it that of God, that of goodwill, that of the common ground on which we can continue to work to be our majestic and awesome God's means of healing hearts and lives torn by war, tragedy, trauma, inhumanity, and the very real evils which abound in our world.

I. IS THERE A NEED FOR HEALING HEARTS ??

Is there a need for Healing Hearts?
Isn't it enough to stop the war, to stop a persecution, to stop a criminal act?
Isn't it enough to provide a home, a job, food, and medical care, resettlement?
Isn't it enough to recover the economy (as if that has happened yet) or restore peace to the streets?
Is there a need for Healing Hearts?

Barely one year ago, a father, a young mother and her small daughter stepped out of the airport terminal in a war torn city and walked to the steps of the last plane loading passengers fleeing to America in front of the atrocities our world labels as ethnic cleansing. With heart pounding drama, this small family was stopped at the steps of the plane by armed men - who knows if they were soldiers, independent militia, or roving bands of thugs taking advantage of a deteriorating political situation. They were stopped. Their passports, visas, and papers were demanded, reviewed, and confiscated. An eight year old, a mother, a father that close to escape and freedom, imagine the terror. In the plane loaded with other escapees, among a crew which did not anticipate this armed intervention, imagine the terror. There were words. There were heroic attempts to intervene. There was a gunshot and before her eyes a young girl watched her beloved father die.

Hasty arms hurried the young child and her mother into the aircraft. Hastily, a crew sealed the door, and taxied away before more blood could be shed. And paperless, without proof of identity a widowed family escaped to America.

But the trauma was not over. When the plane arrive here in Chicago, with the fresh blood of her husband, the fresh blood of her father, in their minds, paperless, alone, without advocates, a hopeful mother and daughter, deplaned in the freedom and stability of America and headed for customs.

And then here in America the trauma returned.

Immediately the mother and eight year old child were questioned, arrested, and, as is assumed to be criminals, because they had no papers, hauled away by more men in another uniform. Never mind the story. Never mind the witnesses. Never mind the freshness of grief, of trauma. They were hauled away - the mother to prison, the daughter to a home for criminal American teens.

Don't tell me there is no need for healing hearts.
Don't tell me people need to just forget it and move on.
And in World Relief - Chicago's Horizons Clinic, at the Chicago Health Outreach clinics, in the CAFE and TAFE groups, in the offices of resettlement staff of Catholic Charities, TIA, IRAM, the Ethiopian Center, and every other place where victims of war and trauma come, this story is mild. This story is nothing compared to the broken, torn, slashed and burned hearts and lives of the refugees who have come here from all over the world including the killing fields of the former Yugoslavia.

Don't tell me that children who watched their fathers murdered need to just get over it!
That men who heard the daily and nightly screams of slow torture and murder need to just forget it.
That torture survivors, survivors so humanly overwhelmed by horror and inhumanity that they could not speak for days, for weeks, need to the next day get back to work, and get over it!

Don't tell me that the women, eight to ninety-eight, raped in their own homes, in the public squares of their own streets, herded into houses commandeered by men with guns and left with dozens of panties strewn on the floor, women raped once, let alone women raped dozens, hundreds, even a thousand times in the rape camps ...

Regardless of who or why or the politics or I don't care what form of justification, don't tell me, these rape victims (and I have not even spoken of the men and boys whose rape by other men is barely spoken in secret, let alone in the press, who's rape is somehow supposed to be the "expected games of war" )
Don't tell me it's over now they need to just go home and go on!
Don't tell me they don't need to heal.

If it requires guns, group intimidation, armies, and brute force to create these wounds, destroy societies, and traumatize the depths of a heart,
Don't tell me the individual heart needs to just forget it and move on.
If alone a country can not rebuild itself,
If alone a city cannot repair its streets
Don't tell me families heal alone.
Don't tell me individual hearts heal alone.
Don't tell me there is no need for healing hearts.

II. WHY IS IT URGENT TO HAVE HEALING HEARTS??

A. Because History Belongs to the Holy Will of a Holy God

As a man of faith, I believe humans were and continue to be created to do the will of God.
I believe that God is holy, that is perfect, righteous, just, and altogether complete in every way. A concept the Jewish faith embodies in the word Shalom.
The will of God has the same nature as the Holy God and so while we may not know every detail of the will of God for or in every minute, we can know that the will of God is moving each human being and the world toward the holiness of Himself and the Shalom, wholeness, that He represents.

Because God is holy, we are called to move toward holiness not division.
Because it is urgent that all men do the will of God, live in shala, live out His shalom.

Because to not heal is to be party to destruction
Because to not heal is to become destroyed and the destroyer
It is urgent business to heal.
It is urgent to have healing hearts.

B. Because History Belongs to the People

While God is priority and the theological argument above is in fact primary, I am not born on another planet. Most people find even my brief statements about God tedious and difficult.
But there is another reason that healing is urgent, that healing can't wait. And this reason is very important to every diplomat, government official, business man, and man, woman, or child.

History belongs to the people.

In every country, in every society, in every religion, in every culture, for survival itself,
the foundation is the people.

No people - no king, no dictator, no president, and no diplomat!
No people - no economy!
No people - no country, no society!
No people - no nation or nationality!
No people - no ethnicity, no race, no culture
No people - no war, no genocide, no evil!
No people - no success and no failure!

The foundation is always the people.

The people are like the car.

If there are no people there is nothing to drive.
If the people (the parts in the car) are broken, the car will either not drive or will breakdown if you try to drive it.

History belongs to the people.
What we do with broken people dictates what happens in the future of history.
Before we can successfully build tomorrow, here in America and even more so in Bosnia, broken, wounded hearts need to be healed.

Let me illustrate why healing hearts is urgent.

History, a country, is built upon the lives of its people, like a building is built of bricks. No matter how beautiful, how strong, each new row depends on the strength and condition of the rows under it.
If one brick is weak or destroyed, the building is weakened.

If the weak brick is not fixed or strengthened it will eventual cause the bricks next to it to be destroyed.

If two bricks together are weak or destroyed, the wall cracks quicker.

If three are destroyed, we can see the damage.

If 100 bricks out of the 100,000 bricks in the building are weak or destroyed, the building will self-destruct unless quickly repaired.

If those 100 brick are side by side at the same location,
the building will collapse.

It does not matter if the other 900 thousand 900 bricks are strong, if 100 located together at one place in the building are weak or destroyed the building will someday collapse.

History belongs to the people.
The future will stand or fall based on what we do with and for hurting people today.

The foundation is always the people.
Hearts that are not healed become destroyed. It is as natural as the crumbling of a weak brick.
Hearts that are not healed become the causes, if not the actual parties, of the next destruction.
If history is not to repeat itself, the individual hearts of individual people must be healed.
If our children, our grandchildren, are not to be destroyed, we must heal hearts today!
Because - to not heal is to become destroyed and the destroyer
It is urgent business to heal.

IT IS URGENT TO HAVE HEALING HEARTS.

III. WHAT IS THE KEYS TO HEALING HEARTS??

There are psychiatrist and psychologists here today who know more about healing hearts than I do. There are social workers and mental health counselors here today that know more about healing hearts than I do. There are grandmothers, and grandfathers, and people of good will present today, that may even know more about the reality of healing hearts than I do.

But, of the many things these people know, I want to speak very briefly about two things which if neglected leave partially healed, perpetually wounded hearts. Wounds and bitterness and dysfunctional beliefs and psychological and ethnic myths and brokenness that will collapse their lives, their families lives, governments, societies, and history itself.

Remembrance and the Hand of God.

A. First Let Us Talk About Remembering.

When our body is cut or bruised that wound has to be cleaned out, explored to determine where the damage is, inspected to see what if any infections have grow while the wound was unattended including determining how far or deep the infection has spread, and then a course of treatment applied will result in healing.

If it is a small cut, we can probably take care of it ourself or a friend or family member can help.
It may only require washing and temporarily protecting the wound from infectious germs.

If it is a larger cut, we may still be able to treat it a home using antibiotics, healing creams, and wrapping the wound to pull the skin together.

A large wound often requires the assistance of the doctor to help stitch it up until the wound heals enough not to come open. Sometimes to help remove dirt and infection that became imbedded before treatment could be secured.
These wounds may heal fast or slow. They may become infected inside the wound and require being drained or even reopened to promote complete healing.
If the wound results from a loss of tissue or even an arm or leg, it can be healed but the lost member or tissue either has to be replaced with flesh from elsewhere, from another person, or with an artificial replacement. Sometimes the loss can not be replaced and the person while healed will have a deep disfiguring scar or have to adjust their way of living to the absence of the body part removed.

These body wounds we can see. We understand them, at least to a degree, and usually we can determine the progress of healing with few real surprises.

One of the difficulties healing hearts is that the same steps often apply. The wound has to be opened, cleaned and examined. Depending on the severity or how much of the rest of life has been damaged by the initial wound, treatment may be simple and swift or difficult and prolonged. Like the physical body, it is amazing how much the heart can heal and how much loss can be accommodated and life rebuild without its replacement.

However, like a flesh wound if left untreated can lead to an unnecessary death, the untreated heart, unhealed trauma, continues to infect a person, a family, a society, and destroys what is healthy in the emotions, relationships, culture, and life as a whole. Wounded hearts can lead to physical deterioration in severe cases and even to death sometimes direct and sometimes indirect
.
Though the damage may be less visible, though the inner deterioration may be masked by an apparent normalization of life for years, the wound of heart does not go away until it is healed.

But, whether slow or fast, it can heal.

It has been particularly painful for me to read lately, allegations that the hidden but open wounds passed from the generation of World War II to their children may have actually helped create some of the willingness of leaders to pursue the inhumanities we call ethnic cleansing. Be that true or not, we know from other histories, that unhealed wounds have resulted in the deaths of millions of innocent victims, the destruction of entire countries, and the partial destruction of more than one continent setting the wounds that erupted latter to repeat the same destruction in a matter of a few years or even decades later.

The difficulty with wounded hearts is that they cannot be helped without revisiting the wound. In other words without remembering. What we are striving to forget. What friends, family, government, and the world may be say to forget, must be remembered and dealt with or the wound can not go away, the effects of the trauma can not heal.

People never really forget. Remembering never really stops. What is remembered gets passed on to person after person, family after family, generation after generation. We can not and dare not forget. Even history teaches us that. All of our religions in one way or another teach us that.
But memories can re-injury us, cut open the wound again, infect us more deeply, spread our injury to others, grow until the truth is lost in the turmoil of fresh wounds created by the memory more than the initial trauma ...

Or memory can be the reminder that helps us prevent the past from re-injuring us and prevents us from spreading the infection and destroying ourselves, our families, our children and grandchildren, our societies, our countries, and our futures.

Memory can be the process by which we bring healing to individuals, families, societies, countries, and, yes, even history. Or memory can turn us into destroyers - destroyers of ourselves, destroyers of our families, destroyers of other people, and, in wars like the recent one in Bosnia, destroyers of history itself.

Let's stop asking people to forget, and lets start helping to heal more individual hearts. Let us start teaching people how to help heal themselves and be a part of the healing of others.

B. There is No Complete Healing Apart from the Hand of God

But, I already stated that complete healing requires at least two keys. Only one was memory. The other is the Hand of God.

Let me stop and caution each of us here. We can not bring complete healing unless we bring people to God for the healing of their spirits and their relations with the Holy One whose will must be followed.

Hearts are more than mind and memory. Hearts are soul and spirit and wound hearts wound the whole persons. Healed hearts must involved the whole person.

For many persons healing from trauma may become the first time they are consciously aware of the deep ways in which they were created as spiritual beings. But their level of awareness does not matter. Complete healing of wounded hearts required something beyond the abilities of the human being alone. Healing hearts requires getting in touch with the will of a Holy God. Healing hearts requires the active involvement, seen or unseen, of the Hand of God.

No God. No healing.

It is that simple. It is how we are created to be.
Healing hearts, whether knowingly or not, means learning to cooperate with God. How much easier it is to recognize the will of God, to cooperate with the Healing Hand of God, if we are at least aware of His Presence and expecting His Care.

Till the operation of the Hand of God is complete, the wound can never remain closed.
For yourself, for your children and grandchildren, for the sake of your country, for the sake of history, get to know, cooperate with, God.
Healing hearts requires two keys - Remembering and the Hand of God.

IV. WHY IS WORLD RELIEF INVOLVED IN HEALING HEARTS??

Finally, and briefly, before my concluding remarks, I wish to address one more question that is very often asked of me as Director, and of my staff, at World Relief.

Why does World Relief do this?

Why does this Christian organization get involved as it does?

How can we do it?
How can belief embrace non-belief?
How can Christians embrace Muslims and other non-Christians?
How can Protestant embrace Catholic?
How can Protestant Western Spirituality embrace Orthodox Eastern Spirituality?
How can one group embrace all the others even when they find it difficult or impossible to tolerate each other?

Are we blind?
(Don't we remember history?)

Are we ignorant?
(Don't we know Christians have hurt some of these people sometimes naming the Christ we serve?)

(Don't we know some of these people have destroyed churches, Christian villages, and even hurt or killed Protestant Evangelical Christians?)

Are we foolish?

Why do we do what we do?

For us the answer is simple - Jesus Christ
Jesus Christ who first loved us
Jesus Christ who said, "Love your enemies"
Jesus Christ who is teaching us how to love - the saint, the sinner, the Christian, the Jew
the Muslim, the one who loves no god at all, as He loved us despite who or how
we were.

But for those who do not define Jesus as we do, that is not a satisfactory answer.
For those who do not see Christ as we do, they do not have to accept that answer.

That's okay.

We still embrace all people, because it is God who created us that calls us brothers.
We still embrace all people, because it is the flesh and blood and genetics of our bodies that shows we are from one beginning as even science is proving again.

It is the labels we call each other that block love and being humans together.
We embrace all people because we are not labels and we are just fellow humans.

But most of all it is that God is in control and we would rather cooperate with Him and what He does beyond our labels and underneath our labels, than to defend even our own label.

God will defend Himself.
God will defend us.
But we,
We at World Relief,
We want to be whole
And unless my neighbor is whole
Unless my neighbor is healed
I can not be whole either!
Anything less would be inhumane!!

CONCLUSION:
Again, there are two ways, avenues for moving forward, forgetting or remembering.

People are the foundation of the future.

People never really forget.
Remembering can lead to health.
Or remembering can lead to destruction.

For our countries,
For our children,
For our grandchildren,
For our world,
It is urgent to have healing hearts.

My diplomatic guests, dignitaries, heads of organizations, business giants, friends, sponsors, and other guests ---

For the last few minutes I have let you into the depths of my mind, into the depths of my heart, as few people including my staff members have ever been allowed before.

I have spoken as if I know what I am talking about. I have spoken boldly as if my voice counted and I had an authority to speak so boldly.

If what I have spoken has offended or grieved your heart, I offer my deepest apology. Offense and grief are not my intention. I have merely spoken my convictions.

My deep strong belief in God, my deep conviction that ultimately healing requires His direct hand, is surely clear. If that belief is foreign or offensive to you, I apologize. It is not my intent by speaking to make you uncomfortable or to feel as if I had a religious agenda. Those words are not the reflection of my "religion." My deep strong belief in God, my deep conviction that ultimately healing requires His direct Hand reflects merely my own personal experience way beyond mental belief.

If I have created any offense, again I apologize. You are my guest. I can not tell you how grateful I am for your presence.

But, one thing I will not apologize for ...
No, two things, I will not apologize ....

First . . . that, in the will of God, in Shalah, hearts need to be healed
-and -
Second . . . my belief that, while that task of healing is not yet complete, especially for the people of and from Bosnia, it has measurably begun.

Healing is desired and it is happening!
And that is reason enough for the community to celebrate!
Healing is reflected by our, by your, being here today.
Hearts are being healed!
And that is reason enough for the community to celebrate!

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