UNEQUALLED FROM THE BEGINNING

by adam harbinson

I didn't sleep too good that night in September, but then lots of folk didn't sleep too well either.

I shall never forget the images that were burned into my mind that morning, and the background stories that are even more harrowing. A little girl aged about six, still wearing the new white sandals her mum had bought her for her first day at school, lay still on the ground. A bomb had blown her through a window and onto the grass at Beslan No 1 school in Ossetia.

No one could get through the hail of bullets to rescue the stricken child, and we can't even begin to imagine her parents' unspeakable horror as they watched the little girl regain consciousness and stagger, dazed and disorientated, wearing only white pants, her hair still done up in a pretty top-knot and with bruises and burns on her legs.

The confused little girl climbed straight back into the burning school gym to die in yet another fearful explosion. How could anyone be so cruel, so bereft on any shred of compassion or humanity?

The conditions inside that dreadful place must have resembled hell. The school teacher who bravely remonstrated with one of the terrorists as they ploughed into the building, pleading that the children be allowed to go home. "Have you finished?" he said. "Yes", and he shot her down in cold blood. Children ended up eating the flowers they had brought for their teachers and drinking their own urine. One little boy plucked up courage and approached a hostage-taker, "Please can I have a drink of water?" and he was run through with a fixed bayonet. Words fail. But where was God?

I listened to Archbishop Rowan Williamson in an interview on BBC's Today programme, and the poor man was struggling. Sadly he fell into the trap that so many of us do, believing that there's an answer to every question. So much better would he have been served if only once he had said, "I don't know!"

What can possibly drive men to plumb such unimaginable depths of depravity that they will shoot naked little children in the back as panic-stricken they run, wanting only the embrace of mummy or daddy? We don't know.

How can they be so misguided that they believe any cause can be advanced by such mindless wickedness? We cannot know. Were they driven by some dark satanic power? Were they so enflamed by the brutality meted out by the Russians in Chechnya a decade ago that their harboured, burning, festering hate turned them into monsters? Or is it another, the worst demonstration yet of the extent to which Islamic extremists will go to rid the earth of the infidel? Who knows?

Trite as it may appear, it must be said that God was in that hell-hole of a school gymnasium, cradling his little ones, weeping with their mothers so unexpectantly caught up in the worst atrocity we can only hope we will ever stand helplessly on the sidelines watching.

God was there, suffering with his people, but was he also a helpless onlooker? No, he has known all along that gross wickedness would one day stalk the earth, and he has told us to expect it; "How dreadful will it be in those days . for then there will be great distress, unequalled from the beginning of the world".

The Christian view is that God will in his own time preside over the ultimate triumph of good over evil. One day the skies will open and we will see 'him who men despised'. Then we will see the outworking of his great plan, when every knee will bow, every tongue will confess his Lordship. Only then will there be no more sorrow, no more suffering, no more death no more Beslans - and he will wipe away every tear.

For reasons that he alone fully understands, he created men in his image, with a freewill, and sadly as we have seen over and again, men can and do, use that freewill for their own evil, selfish purposes.

Cold comfort for grieving, demented families and friends in Ossetia I know, but how much more hopeless and despairing to believe that the cruel butchers of Ossetia will have the last word. "Vengeance is mine. I will repay", says the Lord, and there, somehow, we must leave it.

But take some time, and pray for the broken hearted people of Ossetia.