A scribbled therapy for the night that bombs returned to Paris.

I don’t really know what to say.

I just returned from the city that I love having been attacked by murderers, and sleep now escapes me. The echo of the bombs through the stadium is still ringing in my ears. There are people outside my door dying. I am here reeling from having watched people run like a herd of animals escaping a predator. It is a night where things are not finished. My emotions are so raw and my thinking so unclear that I think it wise that I pen something. Anything. Maybe this is for my own sanity’s sake. I usually do not write on such short notice without long periods of reflection, but today’s events require a change of plans. This one is medicinal. This is not so much a disclaimer about poor grammar, as it is about how emotionally fresh and undeveloped some of the thoughts below are.

Unlike usual, I think this is more for me than for you, so please bear with me.

It all started with soccer. I hate soccer. Slow, and mildly entertaining sport for my tastes, but something my people here in France love so I want try to love it for their sakes. France was playing Germany in the northernmost part of Paris in what is called a ‘friendly.’ A sport that calls its competitions ‘friendly’ is already begging to lose my interest, but I have never been to a professional soccer match so I vowed to give it a fair shake. Not to mention, I have a German friend that enjoys me mocking his country and a love for France that has slowly taken root in my. This all raised the stakes enough to convince me to buy a ticket on our limited budget.

Paris is a city that comes alive at twilight, and tonight it was abuzz with various people executing well-laid plans for their leisure time. It was the usual innocence and sin that makes a Friday night. The Parisian air has an electricity that some say you can only see through the rose colored glasses that you wear the moment you arrive. I have been on the record as saying that Paris is the most beautiful city in the world. It is a symbol in the world for many reasons. We made an evening of it in Paris and spent time talking with a guy who owns a coffee shop and goes to my Church.

His shop is near what would be one of the attack sites. I just now realized that.

When we arrived at the stadium the energy around the match was electric. We sang La Marseillaise, slurred some cheers in our broken French, and prepared ourselves to be wooed by what all those non-Americans call the ‘beautiful game.’

I was almost enjoying the game when I heard what sounded like one of Napoleons ancient cannons being fired at the stadium. It felt like bombardment. I instantly turned to my Australian buddy and said, “I think a bomb just went off.” He assured me that it was just theatrics surrounding the game or something. At first I joked that the French should know that that is not a good idea in a post-9-11 world, but then I soon realized there were no fake cannons near the field and that the sound had occurred at a completely random time. When you go to football games at the University of Oklahoma they use cannons sometimes, but they are from visible places and at times that make sense. This was not like that. This was just random thunder from somewhere that seemed to be just outside the stadium. I could point to where it came from. Not long after we heard the second and ferociously more violent blast. It rattled the ground under our shoes. At that point I looked to my friends and said that was a bomb and we need to get out of this stadium. There was a wave of anxious noise that rumbled through the stadium and people got noticeably nervous. You can see that here. By and large though it did not seem to be any panic in the stadium and people just continued playing and watching the game at hand.

It was a vivid reminder how we can try to entertain ourselves in such a way that we think we are safe from the dangers echoing at our door. Yet there they are. They do not need us to pay attention to them in order to be any more real or dangerous.

We would learn later that the president of France was at the match. We would also learn that the security that had given us such a pat down when we entered that we thought they owed us dinner or something, had been the ones who discovered a man trying to get into the stadium with a bomb in his belt. He had a ticket, but because the security officer discovered the bomb, less people died. There is no win-win situations in the face of such evil, just courage that saves as many people as you can.

It is a good paradigm for understanding our missionary theology.

My phone was nearly dead and I was trying to save my battery, so it was not until I turned it on that I got the news flash that two bombs had just went off outside the very stadium that I happened to be sitting in. We tried to calmly make it to the exits and get a safer distance from whatever was going on. As we came down the long staircase on the outside of the stadium we heard it. The cries of panic and fear slowly roared into a crashing madness. People were getting stepped on. It could only be described as a wave of pure terror. People were running for their lives, thousands of them, all at once. I have only seen such things in movies, but I can tell you that they do not feel the same as this. Absolute chaos. I was high up so I could see them. Scared. They ran like their life depended on it.

They reacted to the fear of those around them in ways that was almost visibly contagious. It spread like wildfire. People were running so desperately that they lost their shoes along the way. We later found scores of shoes littering the passage from people abandoning them in a nervous attempt to escape. Possessions were tossed aside. It was like a train-wreck coming to introduce itself to you that you simply could not look away from.

Time stood still, but things moved at lighting speeds. It was weird like that. We just stood there. We couldn’t hear or see what they were running from. From my vantage point I tried to scan for a gunman or something, but there was too many people. Matter of a fact, I could not see any police either, just mobilized anarchy. My phone was nearly dead so I sent a text to my friend who we had lost sight of in the rush and posted my only update for anybody who might see the news and worry. With 1% battery I sent out a post on Facebook to let my loved ones know that I was safe and that prayer is needed for what was going down. Three seconds later my phone gave up the ghost.

It is situations like these that make it is hard to be married to me.

We decided to head to the nearest metro and try to catch a train home with the hopes of putting distance between us and whatever was going on at the stadium. It was against my instincts to travel in such a large crowd, but they were overruled by the desire to create as much distance as possible between the bombs and us. This decision makes more sense looking back now if you keep in mind we thought this was only an isolated attack, which as things turned out, it was not. It was part of a series of attacks that we were actually heading towards and not away from.

Decision-making was with limited information and a burden of time constraints that nobody could see, but could clearly feel with each minute that passed.

The problem is that masses of people had the exact same idea as us. En route to the train station we were swimming in a crowd of people. I told my friends that this is the most in danger I felt the whole night, besides maybe the stampede or when I first heard the explosions. All it took was one person yelling or somebody doing something stupid and things would be out of hand. The police were directing people only down certain routes and had their machine guns pointed at the crowd. It occurs to me that they had no idea whether someone in the crowd was a culprit. The next killer could be the guy standing next to you. This is the first time I have ever seen a grenade launcher pointed in my direction.

It is worth mentioning that I completely tore up my knee playing rugby the week before and was still walking with a limp. For me running was out of the question, so we just tried to be smart about the moves we made. We were herded toward the train station and you could have cut the tension in the air with a knife. An eerie feeling like a sort of fog descended on all our hearts. We were essentially helpless against any new attacks and felt like sheep headed to slaughter. People didn’t seem to walk, but just creep across the ground with as little talking as they could muster. (Minus the Americans of course, because we are the loudest people on the planet, but the fog of doubt eventually silenced them as well).

It was an uncomfortable calm. We were walking on the edge of a volcano. It was like walking through your own graveyard. It was volatile and is hard to describe exactly.

Once we got to the train station there were security dogs barking like they found something, but we hurried past and onto the train as quickly as could be managed. Everybody was on edge but there was a collective feeling that the worst was behind us. We didn’t know then that this hope was of the false type. Regardless, groups began huddling and people started asking questions about what exactly it was that we just experienced. Just as the train made its first stop at Gare du Nord, there came an announcement that everybody needs to calmly exit the train and as quickly as possible get out of the station in French. This is the real French oral exam. This is a test of your French that you really, really do not need to fail. It is also a clear reason I should study more.

We shuffled off the train and began looking for exits just before security started yelling at us to get out of the train station with a desperation that you could not help but take seriously. Running broke out again and it felt like we were back to square one.

It was just frantic movement without any guarantees. Through the crowds we fought to keep our group in one piece. The worst thing for us was not so much that we were moving slow, but the potential of losing somebody in our group and not being able to find them. Once we got on the street we learned that all the public transit for the city was shut down for the time being and that there were the possibility of other threats in the city. Our small group of about 10 held a pow-wow on the street and tried to get our minds around what was going on.

We needed to pause to recalibrate because the Earth had changed underneath our feet.

Change to sudden to figure out while doing anything else. It’s times like this that you come to terms with the reality that our whole system is built upon a trust that has long since set sails. A trust that is so easily broken. When we go to a movie or attend a ballgame or drive a car, we all assume our neighbors are going to act with civility.

We learned the hard way that it is a paper thin fabric easily torn asunder.

The more urgent problem for us to solve in that moment though was how now to get home. It did not help that we were in the far north of Paris and we live in a suburb in the outskirts of the far south of Paris. We were nearly 10 miles away from anywhere we could hope to get picked up since the roads nearly impossible to use in Paris during normal days, and today was worse than a normal day. We decided that movement was key, so we set our bearings south and took to walking it out. We had not learned yet that there were people driving around shooting at random people. The station with the best chance of being reopened was Chatelet Les-Halles. We figured we would head there and make another decision once we had more information. It was about a 30-45 minute walk, so we set out and tried to use whoevers phone had battery left to find updates and also navigate the winding streets of the city. That is when people started messaging my friends from all over the world demanding to know if we were ok. Since we were not watching TV and Internet was scarce, we really didn’t know as much as people on the outside. We knew only what we could see. We had not made it far when we learned there had been an attack on Chatelet Les-Halles, as well as a number of other spots around the city.

It was not until we were already in the middle of the city that we learned about how wide spread the situation really was. We were essentially walking directly through the middle of it. The attacks were on all sides of us. We felt safe though because we were largely ignorant of what was happening even one or two blocks over.

We heard rumors of hostages at a concert and shootings in other places around the city, but did not know what to do with this information so we just kept walking our group as due south as we could manage. It is worth mentioning that looking back we had an usual peace from the Lord. There was a focus that I believe G-d used to guide us along the particular path we chose. When we looked back on the route we took for whatever reason, we see that we are really fortunate to be among those who made it out.

As I write this, there are 129 dead and 352 injured.

The city was turned into a war zone in a matter of hours. We saw police and ambulances flying around trying to get ahead of a situation that clearly had the jump on them. Absolute madness.

129 dead and 352 injured.

It grieves me that many of these, both attackers and victims do not know Jesus and death has now found them. He comes to give life, but these Muslims chose the way of stealing, killing, and destroying. It is not hard to believe, it is just hard to experience so honestly and without any secrecy whatsoever. We western pagans dress out sin and death up differently and call it by other names. It is weird because at one point in the walk, we realized that none of us had stopped to think whom it might be who would do such a thing. We all assumed it was Muslims. It was not until we raised the question, that we actually took the time to consider that it could be somebody else. There was, after all a minority chance that it could have been somebody else. It never crossed our minds though because we just knew based on past experiences.

I say this not to say anything here about Islam that I have not said elsewhere, but rather to point out the fact that these attacks have become so usual, so normal, that we have come to expect them from one group in particular.

A group of people who have these acts in their founding documents as good things worthy of repetition.

Think about what it means for average people to be able to assume the origin of such nonsense simply because of how frequently they occur. When did the world get this way? The truth is that we have longed lived in a bubble now ready to burst and with a dangerous amnesia towards history. Later we would hear that Muslims around the city were yelling “Allah Akbar” while committing these crimes. I stand to disagree that their Allah is great. Imagine how foreign it is for westerners to comprehend that they were worshipping their false god while shooting hostages in the head. Wrap your mind around that. Let that sink into your heart before you turn on the news or listen to the spin on social media.

I have chosen to call them Muslims and not terrorists because that is what they call themselves. There is no need to invent words for a people that has over a thousand years of history.

In France, I call nuns who wear the cloth, nuns. I am not a catholic, but I try to respect their clear alignment and self-identification. The word extremist should be discarded as well. It falsely makes us think that taking things too far is the problem. It is not. When Martin Luther King Jr. took his Christian beliefs seriously the world would be wrong to call him an extremist. When mother Teresa loved the poor of Calcutta it would be a misnomer to call her an extremist. Is Steve Jobs an extremist for taking technology too seriously? Is Bill Gates guilty too? Unless we are just picking and choosing the forms of extremism that we agree with and disagree with, and not literally all ‘extremism’ or ‘extremists.’ This is why this is a terrible term that is absolutely useless in describing anything. It encourages people to have a false view of what happened tonight. If we are going to prosecute all forms of extremism, then I would love to know who gets to be the authority and decide which forms of extremism are acceptable and which are not. You are in that moment making moral decisions even if you do not believe in G-d. The Christian martyrs may be icons, but in many ways they are like millions of other Christians who are trying to take Jesus teachings seriously. There are millions in other countries that you will never hear of this side of eternity that are best labeled Christian, not extremist. If there is a hospital built in a place nobody cares about I would assume its Christians. If there is a school in a remote village for orphans, I would assume its Christians who opened it. If there is a march for awareness for women in sex-trafficking, or for the life of babies, I would assume it is Christians. If there was people risking their lives to preach the Gospel in North Korea, I would assume its Christians. It makes sense in light of our authoritative Documents, history, and most importantly our King. It is not as though they went too far, but that they went there at all is the reason they should be called after the name of their Master. Minority positions separate from these documents, history, and founder should be treated as such.

I simply want to pay these who filled the streets of Paris with blood the same respect. They are Muslims in the strictest and realest sense of the term. Not only that, but it is strangely consistent with a plain, straightforward reading of the Koran.

You do not have to be a scholar to read the Koran and understand where they are coming from. A task, which I have done before. It is not to say that all who call themselves Muslims are this way, but that in itself is a different discussion about how serious certain Muslims keep the teachings of Mohammed and the Koran or how loosely others do not. I will at the very least stop using the word terrorist. It is an outdated term. It should be abandoned now that we know that a cover up job of political correctness is not going to remedy the situation. It is not helpful that our President cannot say the word ‘Muslim,’ nor is it helpful to declare ISIS contained the day before the largest attack on France since WWII. I am not taking a position for any particular party, but as a citizen of one country living in another.

Have we become a people so afraid of offending the people who are killing our neighbors? We are afraid to call them by their historic name, one that they use for themselves, as they walk into our cities and detonate bombs?

We celebrate the countries and freedoms that our forefathers fought to pass down to us, by handing them over  to violent men we refuse to stop under a guise of being non-judgmental. We use our political correctness as a mask for cowardice.

That discussion is for another time, as well as some thoughts on responding to Islam. I will just say this for now; that this in no way lessens my desire to love my Muslim neighbors or nullifies my commitment to share the Gospel with them. In fact, it gives me great urgency and soberness. I will hug my Muslim neighbors the next time our paths cross. I must still be willing to lay down my life in order to make Christ known here. If there is anybody in the crowd who should run at the gunmen and not away from them it is us who have long ago forfeited our lives to the King. It is no risk at all to die loving our neighbors, even the ones wearing the hijab. I am preparing myself to hear the media make this into a thousand things it is not about. They will say calling those who did this ‘Muslims’ is wrong and I am positioning myself to hate them.

This is one way the world will never understand the fullness of the Christian worldview, that can at the same time can call out sin while also ferociously loving sinners. Atheists who are jerks on the internet, Hindus who beat people to death in the streets, and mothers who abort their babies all qualify as people we will die trying to love if need be.

We can argue for wisdom in regards to immigration reform, while simultaneously being the people who do everything we can for whoever ends up getting dropped at our doorstep. The world asks us to choose either/or … but we keep choosing the way of Jesus. Christianity is beautiful and messy like that. Maybe I will write more about that later.

As I sit here I have a deep sense of gratitude to the Lord who shepherded us along a path that would eventually lead us home. I limped home with the help of some friends. We passed police lines and blocked streets. The walking made us feel better. It was progress. One foot in front of the other was a helpful therapy as we passed the Seine and crossed the bridge into the south.

We prayed and held back tears in shrink-wrapped eyes and thought of the world in which we find ourselves. The talk as we journeyed was small, but it was encouraging to have our people around us and not be alone. I do not have the words to say.

We passed so many monuments that tourists love and it struck me that many of these Christian symbols built into the city are the things that they want to destroy. It is what they stand for. The people of the city have long ago abandoned the Jesus who motivated such art, science, and progress, but the monuments remain. The Muslims think that these Christian symbols are still something that represents the faith of the French people, but they are not.

In many ways though they are hard reminders that we have purged from our thoughts and history. Beautiful things with hard truths engraved in them. We marched passed them like they were lifeless and done telling us truths we have repeated that we do not want to hear. It was sad to think of such civilization dying.

The blockade of the city was in full effect. This required us to walk to a station in the south, near where there are ancient catacombs, in order to meet a friend with a van. This saved us walking the last few miles, which nobody was mad about. I never remember the city of light being so dark. It was the kind of dark you walk through on dangerous unlit streets in bad neighborhoods. Except all neighborhoods seemed to have dimmed the lights. We passed near other people hurrying about as we trekked, but we rarely spoke and there seemed to be a kind of skepticism about every stranger that crossed our paths.

It was a night that was hard to determine who was friend and who was foe. This was a night that you erred on the side of caution with strangers. Looking back now I know that is no way to live the rest of my life. I am from the State who gave us Will Rogers mind you.

It has its time and place though and waiting near the catacombs was one of those times. A friend with a van came and found us and we soon were being situated on board. Like having a friend with a truck in the States, it is always good to have a friend in Europe with a van. We of course felt a relief once we were securely in the van and began to chatter more about the night’s events. Stories of Liam Neeson, Jack Bauer, and Jason Bourne began flying around the conversation. Things slowly returned to normal again, whatever that is. Not soon after thoughts turned more serious about those who were at home waiting on us and most likely worried about our well being. It was nearly 3am before I opened the door to my house.

I came home to sleeping children and a worried wife who gave embraces of relief.

Honestly, I do not think I have felt this weird emotional cocktail of anger and heartbreak since I saw the planes hit the world trade center. Everybody seems to remember where they were when they heard the news. It was like that.

It is weird to feel such a connection to a country not my own, but that is a part of the missionary heart that is hard to explain.

I think all of us westerners in another strong sense have this connection to Paris, the city of light. Dark as it may be this hour. Americans, many of which like myself trace their ethnic heritage at least in part back to Europe, not so curiously interpret European history as our history. Maybe it is in part because our nation is so young by comparison. Regardless, there is a bond that we share with the French that we do not share with many other nations. They came to bat for us in the Revolutionary War, and we paid the favor back when they needed back their beaches in Normandy. It is a long friendship. Today we see their pain as our pain, their burden as our burden. It is the feeling I get for all humanity I guess, but tonight it is mainly for them. There is sadness and a rage that just makes me sorry for these people and wishing I could do more. It is the fighting kind of anger that motivates you to action.

There are tears that want to land like punches. I read the Old Testament so that time may yet come for us all, but it is not tonight and it should not be hastily decided. I would avoid war at all costs, but sometimes you do not get to decide that, rather your enemies decide that for you.

While I sit here in a body that wants to shift me into gears for a battle, it would be foolish to allow it to convince me that this war is merely physical. As a follower of Jesus, I have not always successfully allowed His word to be a strong enough reminder of just how limited my view of evil is. The things going on in the world have deeper and bigger forces at play in them, but are not are beyond the vision of our Lord. While we are ridiculously unprepared for chaos like this, He is never caught off guard. He is not limited nor is it strange for Him to use what our enemies did as evil as means to accomplish some good beyond our sight. We think this will never happen to us. Our hearts get cold and something drastic is used to stir us and to change the direction of our course. We believe the illusion of safety is no illusion at all just because it’s a good one to be entertained with. Our modern thinking is so outdated, but His truth is eternal.

This is a battle against evil, something we were supposed to learn in university that no longer exists. We were told to retire chivalry and that these days of human evil were by and large in the rearview mirror. All deceptions. The kind of lies so easy to believe that it takes something so harsh like the butchering I just escaped to convince us how heinously untrue they are.

Maybe it is for just such a time as this that G-d has brought my family to France. These are important days in the life of France and long ago the Lord worked to position us here. If the scores of people dead in the street will not compel you to pray then nothing will. If full hospitals do not give Christians an urgency to love people with the Gospel then I am not sure what will. We have felt so loved and prayed for during these last few hours, that literally we had to step back from communication and just let things process. After spending time with the Lord we are convinced that we do not want to be vague about what we need from you. While our safety will be an ongoing item on our radar, our deepest desire is for you to pray for us to be bold with the Gospel. Pray for the hearts of the French people who have yet to know what life looks like because all they know is death. It is no small understatement to say that He is the best thing we have to offer to France. It is also not wrong to say that it is worth any cost in order to introduce Him to them. We would hate for you to use all this urgency in prayer that this situation has stirred for anything less than what will effect eternity. We would love for you to link arms with us as we mourn, pray, share, and heal alongside our people.

Pray big, Gospel things for France as you remember that this may be one important chapter in the story, but it is not the final one.