Okay, here’s my final selection from Shane Claiborne’s The Irresistible Revolution. I found this interesting in light of discussions over at Scott Freeman’s place in recent months on the issue of non-violence.

Claiborne tells the story of visiting a hospital in Iraq where children were being treated for injuries they suffered due to the war. One child was asking what she had done to America that they would do this to her. Another person, a father holding his child injured by a missle, said, “What kind of liberation would do this to my child? If this is liberation, then we do not want it. If this is democracy, they can keep it.” The one that stuck with me was from the manager of the hospital, who said this: “Violence is for those who have lost their imagination. Has your country lost its imagination?” A few paragraphs later, Claiborne quotes Walter Wink:

Evil can be resisted without being mirrored…oppressors can be resisted without being emulated…enemies can be neutralized without being destroyed.”

Later in the chapter, Claiborne writes:

Our world is desperately in need of imagination, for we have spent so much creativity devising ways of destroying our enemies that some folks don’t even think it’s possible (much less practical) to love them. We have placed such idolatrous faith in our ability to protect ourselves that we call it more courageous to die killing than to die loving.

Claiborne beckons us to consider the better way, the way of Jesus. Perhaps the Iraqi hospital manager was right. Maybe America has lost it’s imagination. But the possiblity that many American Christians have lost theirs (or so it seems) is more disturbing. Many support war because, as Claiborne says, they don’t see it as practical or even possible for anything else to work. Self-preservation is of utmost importance, even more so than following Jesus’ example.

And I understand that. Sometimes, it just doesn’t seem like there are other options, but I suspect it’s not because there aren’t, but rather because my imagination is too small, my view of God and his power is too small. It’s not always easy to trust God and respond the way Jesus did, to love the way He did. And I admit I would really rather respond in like manner to those who do evil to me. But I think Shane is right when he suggests that it takes more courage to “die loving” than to “die killing”. It takes more courage to live (and perhaps die) as Jesus did than it does to respond the way our sinful nature prompts us to at times. It may be costly, very costly, to truly follow Jesus, to respond with love to those who persecute us, to use our imaginations and find alternatives to the ways of the world. But will it cost us much more if we don’t?