Life persists.

"Before, Iraqi Christians used this part of the church to care for orphans. Then ISIS used it for something else…”

He paused. He may not have wanted to say it, but I asked anyway: "What did they use it for?"

“ISIS used it to train child soldiers. They saw it was set up for children, so I guess they thought it was perfect.”

Perfect.

What a horrible use of that word.

After awhile, you learn to read the rubble, and this rubble screams “children were here!” Tiny sandals and coloring books. Dolls alongside bullet casings and burned hymnals. Broken slabs of marble with inscriptions about Love from the Gospel of John. An exploded mortar round peeled open like a banana. A moldy Avengers shirt.

A few years ago, I would've tripped through this kind of destruction a weepy wreck and assumed the place was done. It’s just done. That’s a word people often use for Iraq or Syria: “done."

Don’t bother hoping or helping or waiting around for healing anymore. That place is done.

The biggest problem with that is history. Beirut was declared “done” in the 80s and now it’s a flooded with tourists. The Nazis figured London was “done” after months of air raids. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Prague, Berlin, Warsaw, even Chernobyl—all places people assumed were done. Even now, just months after being declared “done,” cities across Iraq and Syria are coming back to life. 

Life has a way of quietly persisting, insisting, resisting.
Life isn’t just some passive force, Life is the original rebel. Life is the revolution. It won’t be stopped. People may ignore it, but they'll never stop it.

So I sat in that rubble, but I actually didn’t feel hopeless. Lament what’s been lost, of course. Mourn and weep and hurt with the hurting, absolutely. But don’t ever forget that life will persist.

The question for us is, will we just see the obvious stuff, or will we train our eyes and hearts and souls to see undeniable, irresistible, rebel-Life poking through.

This place was an orphanage founded on Love, then a barracks where children were brainwashed to fight, but what next? What will this ground hold next? Something glorious, I hope.

It’ll be awhile, but it’s inevitable.

For now, we wait. We work.