“Put some 3-D into your 2-D vision!”

Now that I know there are people are reading this blog it makes more sense to keep going.
So far I have explained my original reasons, idiosyncratic though they may seem, for caring about Serbia and the people there.
The problem in 1999, though, was how to communicate this to the Serbs themselves! How could I say “There are good things awaiting you!” in the middle of a depressing dispiriting military defeat without being written off as completely crazy, -or worse still- getting exploited by extremist opinion to underpin some chauvinist position. I found no real solution to this.
In any case, 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!
So for the most part I simply kept quiet, tried finding out a bit on the internet, perked up when Serbia came on the news, prayed occasionally, and got on with my already busy life.
However, if I met someone who might know something about Serbia, I asked them about it. One person had been taken round Belgrade and been shown various NATO targets. “I sensed a deep resentment in the people who showed me” he said.
But the most useful comment was made more recently: “Your vision ties in with what others have said. Go to Serbia! Talk to people there; hear what they have to say; put some 3-D into your 2-D vision!”
Spurred on by this I began looking into things again, and though I still have not found a chance to visit Serbia, but at least tried visiting by proxy: reading books, following the comments made on various web-sites, and trying to get a picture of Serbian moods, concerns, fears, hopes and aspirations.
B92 s web-page in English (http://www.b92.net/eng) where there are some who even blog in English, has been a particularly useful starting-point. There are also a number of other web-pages in English, for example (www.srbija.sr.gov.yu/) and many others. My vision is not exactly 3-D yet, but thanks to internet it is less 2-D than it was.
It also introduced me to blogging, (still in its infancy 7 years ago) and solved the other problem: how I can tell Serbs the good news:
“God loves you, and has a wonderful plan for you!”

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.

Insipid or Demented?

May 1999.
When you are given a glimpse of the heart of God, it can feel like a heavy burden. Mercifully, most of us only pick up on a small portion at a time (which is probably just as well,) for it may become too much to carry and you need to retreat awhile into everyday life. Therefore my concern for Serbia has therefore not always been equally intense; but it has got my attention.

The baffling problem has been what to do with the burden. Good things await the Serb people, but surely they are the ones who need to know it, not me? And how can they be told from two thousand miles away by a stranger who knows little about Serbia?

Pushed by the sense of burden I consider writing to some newspaper or other, but I know nothing about Serbian news channels, and even if I did, most likely that is a waste of time. Why should anyone take it seriously? Of course I would choose the words carefully, but if muted the burden seems insipid, when "told like it is" it sounds demented, and could even end up misused in support of extreme nationalism.

I really find no solution; and in the meantime the demands of everyday life drown out the urgency.