Getting my Act Together

If God has good things in store for the Serbs, why tell me, a Brit living in a completely different part of Europe and having no previous special interest in Serbia? The Serbs need to know it, not me!
Surprisingly enough, in time I found several good reasons! To mention some:

1. Because I asked
2. Because somebody has to believe in Serbia, if Serbs themselves cannot
3. Because I have some experience
   
4. Because I can intercede (=pray) for Serbia

I will now explain these points. I cannot avoid religious considerations when I do. So if, honourable reader you are not religious, please bear with me: there may be method in my madness; maybe something to profit by all the same.

• "Because I asked"
  

does not imply that nobody else has asked. I see indications that others have too, but not much information on what they have to say. e.g. Stig

• Because somebody has to believe in Serbia, if Serbs cannot do it for themselves.

I say this because Serbian sources seem dominated by a deep lack of self- confidence. It emerges as either a paralysing cynicism or a pseudo optimism; the one cannot quite believe in or be glad about positive signs ("there must be a catch somewhere"); the other assertively defends Serbian symbols, Serbian rights, and argues Serbia's potential, but it often has a hollow ring to it, as if the bloggers and commentators are not quite convinced; as if they are flying in the face of experience and avoiding the uncomfortable. In short an optimism born of defensiveness rather than security.
(These are, of course, purely subjective impressions).
However, there truly is hope for Serbia, I have seen it and I am glad I have, because after reading some of the comments. and following blog "flames" between intransigent Albanian and Serb bloggers it sometimes feels easiest to be a pessimist.

But, in the words of "Les Miserables":

Can you hear the people sing
Singing the song of angry men?
It is the music of the people who won't be slaves again
When the beating of your heart
Matches the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start
When tomorrow comes!

Visions apart, I detect a people who feel that they have been duped in the past, and have no intention of being duped again. I detect a people with a healthy potential for self-irony, and often bleakly aware of past failings. I read a new Constitution that may have many limitations (-that can be changed if the will is present-) but many laudable guarantees also. I see an economy with major growth potential , and a people coming out of isolation slowly in a world that has already forgotten last week's headlines. (Anti-Serb feeling there may be, but it is not as prevalent as Serbian people seem to imagine).

• Because I have experience.

Serbia is not top of the agenda for the people round me and until recently few knew of or understood my concern, which wilted for lack of response. However that is not good enough reason to drop the matter: They have their job to do. I have mine.

Just like when I was young and it raised eyebrows when I took an interest in vikings. What was there to know about vikings except that they were savage plunderers? (A great deal, in fact, and now the English have grown to understand why, and are even proud of their Scandinavian roots.) In the end this interest took me to Norway, and I have no reason to regret it or believe I was wrong.

Later I became interested in the situation of South Africa. I met white South-Africans who were nothing like their media stereotype, anything but racists, but sometimes not aware enough of the true consequences of their Government's policies.
In the following years I prayed for that country off and on and discovered that a number of others were doing it too. As we prayed, we saw some very specific answers in the midst of an apparantly doomed situation.

• Because I can pray for Serbia

I am amazed how slow I have been grasping this! Despite my experience from praying for South-Africa, the penny never truly dropped until I began to trawl the blogs and internet sources seriously. Having begun, I also see a number of similarities between Serbia and Norway, which (hopefully) helps to give my prayers more pertinance. Now that I am getting my act together at last, I try to be more consistent regular and systematic than I was last time round.

God does not have to find me blameless before He can love me

I once asked my mother if people in Britain during the war heard about the concentration camps and the genocide the Nazis perpetrated.

"Yes" she said, "but we thought it was just propaganda invented by our own government."

Not every German was a Nazi, or committed atrocities even if we have to admit some were good at looking the other way. So if it was hard for the British during the Second World War, to imagine that these horrors really were happening, how much harder for the German people? Who is willing to accept that their countrymen, their husbands, their sons or brothers at the front are perpetrating acts that are the stuff of nightmares until confronted with hard, -almost unbearable- evidence?

And just as the whole guilt issue for Germany was far more subtle and intricate than their one-sided Post-War image, -so also with Serbia, in fact probably even more so. Without incontravertable evidence, why should any Serb assume at the outset that their countrymen have massacred civilians? This of course will be compounded by the one-sidedness of Western European news media (-obvious to a Serb, but not to an outsider-).

So what is the reality?

Reality is the way God sees things: the background causes, the individual decisions, the deliberately caused, and the unintentionally caused evils, the manipulation, the complicity and the innocence; -All!

So how does God distribute the blame?

-Justly: to each according to his own works!

I am responsible for what I perpetrate, what I condone, what I deliberately ignore and for my own wrong attitudes. The guilt is mine, whatever the circumstances giving rise to it. The wrongdoing of others does not absolve me, whatever the provocation! They will have to face what they have done, I will have to face what I have done! In this sense "each must bear their own burden".

But the good news is this: God does not love me because He finds me blameless; He Loves me even though I am not! As long as I do not hide from my complicity, God is prepared do have dealings with me, and He himself has paid the price for my wrongdoing.

There is a condition that goes with this: I cannot expect Him to forgive me, unless I accept that He will forgive others, and except I am willing to do likewise.

That is not the same as denying, ignoring, condoning or underplaying the seriousness of what may have been done against me, or pretending the pain I may have suffered was not as bad as it was, or has magically disappeared. Nor does it mean that crimes should go unpunished. Forgiveness means to be willing want God to treat my enemies with the same generosity He has treated me with, and to be prepared myself to be as generous.

It was heart-wrenching to hear

of Serbs abroad saying during the Kosovo crisis: "Now we know what it felt like to be a German right after the Second World War".
It must make you feel really helpless to be blamed for something you never condoned never committed and have never been consulted on. A handful of politicians and their henchmen plus unscrupulous manipulation with the facts leave you the object of blind uninformed prejudice: --ugly, objectionable, and sticky as tar.

Beograd

Sunday the 11th of April 1999
The burden from Easter Day lies so heavy upon me that I wish I could be in Belgrade now; --there where the people are suffering under NATO's hammering. A futile wish, of course; what use would a crazy foreigner be to the Serbs at a time like this? I find myself longing to tell them they are cared for, they are loved.
And where was God during the NATO bombing?
Right there where the bombs were falling
Suffering with the people.

"There was once a people, feared and hated

and despised the length and breadth of Europe. They were called the vikings, -the modern day Norwegians. But God took that people, changed them, and made them a blessing to the other peoples of the world.
And there is another people, at present (april 1999) feared, hated and despised throughout Europe: the Serbs. But God wishes to take them, transform them, bless them and make them a blessing.
--What God has done with you Norwegians, can He not also do with the Serbs?

How Typical of God!

5th of April 1999
Was it real? or do I have an over-active imagination?
And yet my impressions from yesterday hang heavy upon me, and feel especially frustrating as I could not pass on the message straightaway (although I accept the wisdom of that decision).
I have had this kind of conviction come over me before. That doesn't give me a carte blanche to say what ever I feel like, though, and both the speaker and the hearer have a responsibility to check out the truth of a Word. What criteria am I to test this Word by?
Well, nothing seems unbiblical: that God loves the Serbs, I can see from the Bible; that God does not want the death of any, I know (-and it will be literal death once the bombs start falling again!) And I know God wishes to bless people everywhere.

But as I think of my Easter experience three things strike me especially as making this, "prophecy" ring true. (Let's call it that, even if it does sound pretentious.)

1. the unexpectedness. It was completely contrary to the current public opinion and definitely not something I felt already. On the contrary, given all that negative press and the continual stigmatization of the Serbs, I was more inclined to approve of the NATO reaction if anything!
2. the experience left me with a completely new sense of love, concern and identification with the Serbs and their plight. I felt like I was vibrating in harmony with heart of our Lord.
3. the positive content of the message:
   

Mankind wants punishment,
God longs to forgive;
Mankind uses force to solve things,
God prefers a change of heart.
Man stoops to bombing, war, destruction and hate,
God stoops to bless.

--How typical of God!