Are you still with me from yesterday? Now that is amazing . . .

Remember, I’ve got this really bad problem with my eyes? They’re always wanting to read something and that has caused me some discomfort.  Something like . . .

An estimated 200 million Christians worldwide suffer interrogation, arrest and even death for their faith in Christ, with another 200 to 400 million facing discrimination and alienation.

Excuse me? Two hundred million? My little brain has a problem wrapping itself around that. Gotta be a mistake, or a blatant exaggeration. Right?

Oh, how I wish it was . . .

Soon Ok Lee, a Christian survivor of North Korea’s political prison camps and 1 of the 200,000,000, gave this description:

“I also saw many Christians in the camp. Because of their belief in God, and because they sang hymns in the camps, they were stepped on until death. If they didn’t deny God, they were often times burned to death from boiling hot liquid metal. I saw many unspeakable things. And these weren’t rare sights for me. Because I went through many physical tortures; I still have many after-affects left on my body. The right side of my face is still a little distorted, the left half of my mouth is crooked and the whole left half of my teeth were crushed. I live with a lot of physical pain on my body and it’s difficult to get through each day. But there are still many people going through tortures and human experiments even at this very moment.”

What really bothers me about that description is that I can give you hundreds, yep, hundreds more that are as bad and worse. My eyes were opened and, like the proverbial moth drawn inexplicably towards the flame that would forever alter its life, they found account after account of Christians — what I claim to be — being tortured, deprived of their goods, homes and businesses, made into slaves (that still exists?), abused, killed. Solely because they claim to follow this Jesus fellow.

What’s really kooky is that in all of these accounts the individual in question was given a way out, a get-out-of-jail-and-pass-go card that would stop everything immediately and restore what had been taken from him. All he had to do was to say he was done with the Christian thing and all would be forgiven. It wouldn’t be hard to rationalize it this way: say what is necessary to protect myself and my family; I don’t believe what I’m saying in denying Jesus and this will allow me to continue to tell others about him; what good am I to the Kingdom if I’m locked away in a jail cell or dead?

Makes sense, doesn’t it?

But they don’t do that. They languish in prisions that are horrible beyond our ability to comprehend. They endure torture that causes your stomach to turn as you read the account; they watch family members, wives, husbands, little children, parents, tortured and killed before their eyes, helpless to do a thing about it — all because of their faith.

And then — and this is the really goofy part — as they lay broken in the filth and horror of their 4×4 prision cell, they sing praises of thanks to the Lord, they tell their fellow prisoners about their Jesus, they minister to those around them. They do and become the extraordinary when logic and reason screams, “just curse God and die!”

My eyes got me into this mess about 36+ months ago. I’ve tried, unsuccessfully, to get over it. It has altered my life, and my faith. It’s caused me to re-exame the words of Jesus and Paul and Peter and John. What I once perceived as an antiseptic, nice, comfortable, follow-Jesus-and-live-happily-everafter type of faith has been forever ripped from me.

I say “ripped” because it hurt to lose it; kinda like finding out that not only is Santa Claus not real, but the fellow imitating him murdered your mother. “Ripped” as in the death of a loved one, the loss of a marriage, the betrayal of a close friend. Life changing stuff.

Because of where my stupid eyes led me, I now must look at those nice, benevolent words that Jesus uttered as declarations of war. Taunting words that dare you to cross the line drawn in the sand. Frightening, scary words that promise a life of war, struggle, discomfort and even pain.

Once you’ve opened Pandora’s Box, you cannot just simply close the lid and pretend you didn’t see what was in it. Once your eyes have shown you the real Jesus and what he really is asking you to do, can you just ignore it and go on with your life as though you’d not seen it?

To quote that great prophet, Louis Armstrong: “If ya ain’t got it in ya, ya can’t blow it out.”