And Jesus Wept

I know that it's quicksand to give God human attributes. But how else are we going to describe Him so that human understanding can think and talk about the divine?

I was in Somalia investigating how we might help rehabilitate what remained of the one standing hospital in the middle of famine and civil war. 

"Standing" is generous. It had no roof, no medicines, no surgical tools. Since it seldom rained, the missing roof wasn't the most urgent problem. We were partnering with the one female Somali doctor who had stayed, the only one remaining in the entire country.

I walked just behind her as she gave a running commentary about the needs of the facility. With every step, it became clearer: This was not really a hospital. It was where a hospital used to be.

Then I saw her.

She was sitting on rawhide bed springs. Vacant eyes staring at nothing. The expected swollen belly of severe malnutrition. She was three years old and weighed approximately 11 pounds.

I was drawn to her the way metal shavings are drawn to a magnet. I walked over to this emaciated, beautiful little girl and, almost without realizing what I was doing, ran my index finger down her cheek.

Her eyes focused for a moment. She stared at this apparition—a white man from rural Kentucky standing in the ruins of a Somali hospital.

Then she smiled.

And I was completely undone.

My soul screamed silently toward heaven: Where did this smile come from?

I am not a man who makes life-altering decisions for my family unilaterally. My wife and three boys were spending yet another day without their father and husband, back in Nairobi, Kenya. I understood the weight of that. But in that moment, everything in me cried out to God with a single, certain prayer: This one goes home with me.

In those days, I had strong relationships within the United Nations and other key organizations. I had done favors for well-placed people inside the U.S. Embassy in Kenya. After verifying that all of her family had died, I knew—I knew in my innermost being—that our three boys were about to have a new sister.

Then the doctor called me from a nearby room.

A young boy had been hit by a truck. Broken arm. The hospital didn't have so much as an aspirin, let alone a proper splint. I fell back on my EMT training, went to the truck, found a cardboard box in the back and some string under the front seat. Together, the doctor and I set the boy's arm and tied a makeshift cardboard cast around it.

It took about 30 minutes.

When I returned to the room where the little girl had been, she was gone. I asked the doctor. She went to check, and came back a few moments later to tell me. The little girl had died while we were setting the boy's arm.

That smile was gone.

"And Jesus wept." (John 11:35)

That is the shortest verse in the Bible. And in certain moments—standing in the rubble of what used to be a hospital, in a country shattered by famine and war—it becomes the most important one.

I don't fully understand the grief of God. I know the theological caution around attributing human emotion to Him. But I also know what I felt in that room, and I believe with everything I have in me that heaven was not unmoved.

A nameless three-year-old girl, 11 pounds, no family, no roof over her head, smiled at a stranger. And then she was gone.

The world didn't notice. The world never notices. That is exactly why we go.

The Great Commission isn't a program or a campaign. It is the relentless pursuit of the ones the world has already written off—the forgotten, the perishing, the ones sitting on rawhide bed springs in roofless rooms in the middle of nowhere. Jesus sees them. He has always seen them. And He weeps.

So must we.

Nik Ripken has served among the persecuted church and in some of the world's most broken places for over three decades. His work and the testimonies he has carried home form the foundation of The Insanity of God and the ongoing mission of Nik Ripken Ministries.