praying for osama

I'm praying for Osama bin Laden.

It's Christmas Day, and we speak of a child born into this world, announced as the Prince of Peace, Emmanuel, “God with us”. 2008 years or so later, we're celebrating Jesus' birth in a world that needs a message of peace more than ever.

Current Western leaders seem clear on the agenda: we're fighting “The War on Terror”. It seems to me much of the time that this could better be called “The War of Terror", Western military might taking terror to the middle east, while our politicians ensure we continue to experience terror at home too—terror at the thought of extremist violence, our fear of immigrants and refugees, distrust of the Muslim and the Arab. And the objective of this? Western purportedly “Christian” leaders on both sides of the Atlantic pursuing their own version of Jesus' teaching... as one person at the inclusive church conference quipped the other week: Love your enemy; just make sure he is dead first.

I'm an uneasy pacifist. I find it hard to believe war could ever solve any problem. But I gulp when asked the trite-but-telling Hitler questions... Or Rwanda. Or should we talk about Sudan? How could we not stand up to evil? How could we not stand up to evil. When do we move from stand up to strike back? (But then shouldn't we strike first against evil... You can see where this goes. Yes, and who defines evil and so on.) Turn the other cheek. Yes. Allow blows to rain on the “other cheek” of a child... of my child? Hmm. Difficult teaching.

Yet amongst it all, when I simply wished for the violence to stop, for the terrorists on all sides to cease their escalation, what did I do? Nothing.

Just recently, in a conversation at our church home group I was challenged. Imagine if Osama bin Laden changed. Imagine if he no longer wished to unleash (in?)descriminate violence upon the world... western or otherwise. Imagine if Osama came to know a God who chooses not just to love but to define himself as love. How the world might change.

So today, as we celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace, I'm praying for Osama. I pray that God will bless Osama in every way. I pray that he evades the capture of those who would seek to harm him—including the representatives of our western governments. I pray that God protects him and those he cares for. I even pray that God will prosper his plans. But... I pray that God would break through the hatred, the distrust, the evil, any selfishness, and every thing that stands in the way of the Kingdom of Love. I pray that he would melt Osama, changing him as we all need changing from what he is to what he is meant to be. I pray that his plans will prosper because they are plans for good and not for evil, plans to build up and not tear down, plans that have grown in the heart of God, and born of the vision that I believe led God to become one of us, as baby born in a poor family, in an insignificant town, in an occupied country, and born to be the Prince of Peace.

This cannot happen. Not by human wishes, or the effort of individuals, or the intervention of the international community. But I believe nothing is impossible for the God who accomplishes the greatest miracle of all—to change people. So today, I'm praying for Osama.