Earlier today a mother and her two daughters aged nine and twelve went to one church, a father went to a second, and their two teenage sons went to a third church. Then they all blew themselves up.
When I first heard about the bombings in Surabaya, Indonesia, I was sad. But I can’t really say that I was truly put out. I mean, there is at least one other suicide bombing in the news today. There were seven others since May 5th. This isn’t an increase in pace, it is simply the length of time I went back in looking up recent terrorist attacks. Eleven suicide bombings, seventeen countries, forty-four attacks, two hundred twenty-one killed, at least two hundred ninety-six injured in the last eight days. If I were to shoot back another week, it would be no surprise to see almost the same numbers, and similar numbers for the week before that.
I wish each and every one of these attacks broke my heart and changed my world the way Paris or Nice or even 9-11. I wish I knew each and every name of the five hundred plus victims of these barbaric crimes committed. But like the rest of the world, I suffer from terrorist fatigue. Another Islamist suicide bomber hit today in…
I hear those words too often. We all do. But today I was almost out the door with a basket of dirty laundry to go wash when I was stopped in my tracks. My news channel told me that this spate of Muslim bombings of churches in Indonesia were all carried out by one family. It told me that two of those bombers were preteen girls. What kind of sick mother would help her young girls strap bombs to their chests and then walk with them hand in hand to go blow up innocent victims? How grotesquely broken does a father have to be to drive the three of them to their destination and then take himself to another church to do the same?
I wonder if they were reading their twisted understanding of what God commanded in their own language or if they read it in Arabic:
Dan bunuhlah mereka di mana saja kamu jumpai mereka, dan usirlah mereka dari tempat mereka telah mengusir kamu (Mekah); dan fitnah itu lebih besar bahayanya dari pembunuhan, dan janganlah kamu memerangi mereka di Masjidilharam, kecuali jika mereka memerangi kamu di tempat itu. Jika mereka memerangi kamu (di tempat itu), maka bunuhlah mereka. Demikianlah balasan bagi orang-orang kafir.
Kingdoms Collide 
In Islam to kill apostates or infidels is honored, and to commit suicide by doing so is the ultimate honor.
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It seems wrong to attach a “Like” to this. The barbaric way the world has devalued people and human life is appalling. But what people do with bombs there, we as believers often do with our words–slaying people’s souls with criticism and hate. When in fact we’re all made in God’s image. Life is not for us to take haphazardly. Thanks for pointing out what’s happening in your neck of the woods. It should wake us all to being more compassionate and forgiving.
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Indonesia isn’t really my neck of the woods, but Jerusalem would be less than a two-hour flight and some pretty rough stuff is happening there too.
The sad thing is, the very day I was writing this, another family also in Indonesia did the same thing at a police station rather than at a few churches. Again, an eight-year-old girl was one of the bombers. This is sickeningly sad. Indonesia had been consistently held up as the model society of Moderate Muslims. This is moderate?
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