My Dear Sisters and Brothers in Christ

Every now and again one comes across a simple, serendipitous book that leaves you feeling enriched by the reading of it and encouraged in your own journey through life. Susan has just read one such book, "Random Act" by Cindi Broaddus.

It is autobiographical; the story of Cindi. Cindi is very much an ordinary "somebody," with no especial gifts or skills, someone who is struggling to make her way through life. And for Cindi the first 50 years of her life really had been a struggle. Divorced while still young, she had been forced to raise her 3 children as a single parent, which in her case meant holding down 3 jobs at a time in order to earn enough money for her and the children to survive. Only once the children have grown up do the pressures begin to ease and life seems to settle down and fall into place. She meets a wonderful man. They fall in love and, as they begin exploring the possibility of a life together, plan to go away on a dream holiday together.

As they pass under a bridge while driving to the airport to begin their dream holiday, someone throws a bottle of acid at them from the bridge. It strikes the windscreen, shattering both the windscreen and the bottle and her face and body are smothered in acid. Instead of a romantic holiday Cindi finds herself in a hospital ICU fighting for her life. Before she knows it the days have stretched into weeks and even months of excruciating agony. The burns are so severe that the acid-burnt flesh has to be scraped and scrubbed away on an almost daily basis. Dozens of skin grafts follow as the surgeons battle to reconstruct her damaged face and body.

As soon as she is well enough to be interrogated she is visited by the police officers assigned to investigate the case. They are caring and compassionate towards her and reassure her that everything possible is being done to find the person who has committed what they call "this random act of violence." Once they have him, they promise, they will make sure that he regrets the day he was born.

But those words, intended as words of comfort and reassurance for her in her pain, have the opposite effect. As she lies there in a state of almost unbearable pain, she finds herself wondering what had driven her assailant to inflict such terrible pain on a total stranger. The more she thought about it the more she came to see her attacker as someone broken, angry and in intense emotional pain at least as deep as her physical pain. Instead of feeling anger and hatred, she found herself feeling a deep sadness and pity for him / her - for a person whose life was so damaged and filled with hurt that the only way of relieving the pain was to lash out at others, seeking to inflict as much suffering and hurt as he / she had experienced.

That "random act of violence" she realised, might have been random, but it was all too common. The world is filled with such random acts of violence that give rise to still more pain and anger and hatred, and feed a never-ending cycle of violence. There and then she decided that what is needed in our world is random acts of kindness and love. The rest of the book is the story of such random acts.

I tell this story simply because it is an Easter story; a story of death and resurrection. That random act of violence destroyed Cindi's life as she knew it, and could have left her bitter and angry. But it has not. Instead of lashing out at others in her pain and spreading the pain, she has absorbed it and contained it, not in her own strength, but by the grace of God. It is by the grace of God that she has been filled with a compassion for her assailant that has made it possible for her to truly forgive him / her (he / she has never been apprehended) and to reach out into the world in random acts of kindness that have been a blessing to so many people and which have, at the same time, given her life a new shape and a new meaning.

Resurrection life is not about an Easter event two thousand years ago; it is about the here and now, the you and me, and all the others who in the pain and struggle of life have been touched by God. It is about death and resurrection, of dying to the old so that the new might come in all its glory.

May you be touched by a random act of God and your life filled with random acts of love.

+ Brian

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