Her Picture

Scanning the recent posts of U social media one photo repeatedly caught my attention, having gone viral.  The young woman smiling back at me looked so familiar.  I clicked to enlarge the image, and a whole host of memories came flooding back to me.  ‘I know her.  She used to teach English at the center next to my apartment.  We went out for coffee and lunch several times.  She invited me to break the fast over Ramadan at her parent’s home.  She and her best friend came over to my place often to hang out between their classes.  I wondered what she had accomplished that everyone was posting her picture.’  As I started to read the articles, I was heartbroken and in shock.  It wasn’t a record of her achievements, but an obituary sharing the news of her death.  Sadly, not just her death, but her preceding detainment and harsh treatment at the hand of the government in one of their supposed “re-education camps’.  

In my grief I recalled the few spiritual conversations I knew we had had during our times together, but I wondered if I had ever shared clearly enough that she knew salvation comes through Christ alone.  With a heavy heart I also thought about the hundreds of U people mourning her loss by posting about the vicious brutality she, and so many others, have been forced to endure. Lord, give us as a team your wisdom on how to engage such a broken, hurting people with the hope and life offered in You.