You probably heard about the Berkeley City Council passing a motion declaring the Marine recruiters in their city "uninvited and unwelcome intruders" and about Code Pink's aggressive, ongoing protest against those recruiters, which includes carrying a banner with the words "No military predators in our town," calling the recruiters traitors, and physically blocking anyone trying to enter the recruitment center (as the police stand by, remaining "neutral").

But yesterday, I was told about a story you might not have heard.  Eamon Kelley, a Marine who was present at the continuing protest last week, witnessed an incident he described in an email to a friend:

While we were at the protest in Berkeley from 12 to 4 p.m., a white Volvo drove by and a man spat upon Code Pink.  They chased him down the street and got into a verbal altercation.  The police were NOWHERE in sight.  That’s not the best part, ready for this?  Medea Benjamin [co-founder of Code Pink] yelled, and I quote, “Marines!” She actually yelled for our help because this man had stepped out of his car.  I even asked her if she was yelling Police and she told me, “I said Marines” then put her arm around my friend Allen (the Marine Vet).  Ironic?

As I was listening to my roommate tell me about this, I admit I was hoping for some juicy justice in which the Marines said sadly, "I'm sorry, we've decided you were right.  You don't need us, and we should go away.  Good luck with your problems, there."  Nobody can deny that's exactly what they deserved.  But my snickers of anticipation were silenced when I heard there was no witty comeback from the Marines.  Apparently, they helped her.

The whole story ended up making me weep.  I wept at the strength, and mercy, and goodness of men who would risk their own safety to help a person who hated them, mocked them, picketed them, and demanded angrily that they leave town.  How, how were they able to do this in the face of such bitter and stark unfairness? 

I wept because I then saw the face of Jesus in these men--a beautiful, powerful, deeply humbling mercy towards me, His enemy.  In a new and biting way, I saw what I deserved, and the mercy of His self-sacrifice was suddenly beyond imagining.

I wept because I didn't see Him in me.  Lately, in dealing with those who mock the truth, I've been acting more like the spitting passerby who hated the protesters and wanted to punish them than the Marines who steadfastly persevered in serving them.  Oh, Lord, help me!  I don't know how to love people like that.  I can't love people like that. 

I wept for the people of this world who continue to scream at Jesus to leave them alone, stubbornly suffering the daily consequences of a life lived without Him.  There will be an end to God's patience, and the full, righteous, deserved justice will come.

May God have mercy on us all.

There has been some talk about Frank Schaeffer's new book about his father, Crazy for God.  Os Guinness's review is now posted on the Books and Culture website:

The problem is not so much that Frank exposes and trumpets his parents' flaws and frailties, or that he skewers them with his characteristic mockery. It is more than that. For all his softening, the portrait he paints amounts to a death-dealing charge of hypocrisy and insincerity at the very heart of their life and work. In Frank's own words, his parents were "crazy for God." Their call to the ministry "actually drove them crazy," so that "religion was actually the source of their tragedy." His dad was under "the crushing belief that God had 'called' him to save the world." Because of this, his parents were "happiest when farthest away from their missionary work." Back at their calling, they were "professional proselytizers," their teaching was "indoctrination," and it was unclear whether people came to faith or were "brainwashed" and "under the spell" of his parents. Frank's own arguments in their support, he now says, were a kind of "circus trick". . . .

 

For six years I was as close to Frank as anyone outside his own family, and probably closer than many in his family. I was his best man at his wedding. Life has taken us in different directions over the past thirty years, but I counted him my dear friend and went through many of the escapades he recounts and many more that would not bear rehearsing in print. It pains to me say, then, that his portrait is cruel, distorted, and self-serving, but I cannot let it pass unchallenged without a strong insistence on a different way of seeing the story. There is all the difference in the world between flaws and hypocrisy. Francis and Edith Schaeffer were lions for truth. No one could be further from con artists, even unwitting con artists, than the Francis and Edith Schaeffer I knew, lived with, and loved.

Guinness gives some interesting thoughts in his review on what he thinks happened in the Schaeffer family to bring them to this point, with lessons for anyone trying to simultaneously guide a ministry and raise a family.

(HT:  Between Two Worlds)