The MountainSky Journal

In my Update on the War in Kosovo (1/7/2000), I left something out. Something big. You should have gotten to the end of that column and said something like, "You'd think he'd at least mention..." Do you know what it is?

Before I tell you what I left out, let me say that if you don't know what it is already, then you may be vulnerable when you are reading, or when you are watching and listening to news and commentary. You'll need to be careful that you are not deceived by explanations or predictions which are reasonable as far as they go, but which are in fact unreliable because they don't take into account all of the relevant data. You may not have considered this, but in modern journalism there's an emphasis on telling the truth which stresses the need to quote accurately and to state facts accurately, but there is almost no submission to a standard of truth when selecting facts to present and when selecting what to quote. So the journalists think they're telling the truth -- and they are according to the standard they acknowledge -- when they accurately present a selection of facts and accurately render a selected quote, even if the selection does not truly represent what happened or what was said. Beware of this. Ask the questions: What is she leaving out? What is he not telling us?

And now for what I left out in my last column: I said not a word about what the Lord is doing in Yugoslavia.

That's quite an omission, because over the long run, it matters greatly how the living God deals with the Serbians and Kosovars, and it matters little what Presidents Clinton and Milosevic do while they briefly hold positions of leadership.

"We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, against spiritual forces in high places." If there is a bloody war going on -- oppression of the innocent, murder, injustice, a malevolent spirit of vengeance -- then we can be sure there is a tremendous spiritual struggle happening. The rhetoric of politicians and the maneuvering of armies of flesh and blood are only one dimension of what is really going on.

My column painted a gloomy picture, not because it was inaccurate in the statements made, but because it excluded all mention of the dimension in which real hope is found. What if the Lord blesses the witness of Christian believers in Kosovo and Serbia? What if the church begins to grow, and people are convicted of sin and repent? What if men who are today consumed by a passion for vengeance begin to submit to Jesus? What if the love of Christ reaches hundreds of thousands of people and they find they are able to forgive? Could it be that in 100 or 150 years, after the Gospel has been accepted throughout Kosovo and Serbia, that the troubles of these days will be as indistinct as the passions of the American Civil War are today for United States citizens?

Time, by itself, doesn't heal. Time can let hatred and bitterness fester. Malice can be passed on, parent to child, parent to child. But the grace of God at work in a land can bring light where there is nothing but darkness; it can work change in the heart of an individual, of a town, of a nation.

Peter Barry 1/11/2000

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