Brokenness

How do we respond to brokenness?

That is the question of the day for me. In the past few weeks I've been reminded of bad decisions in my past that I'm still making amends for. I've realized as much as I have personal, spiritual freedom from my brokenness because of Christ's righteous redemption in my life. All the same, as I look out of my own internal world, the world overall is broken. Just broken.

I've been haunted by an evening I had among young people recently. Most of them were native English speakers. I slowly worked through the crowd. I only knew two girls there. When one guy and I looked at each other, however, and he commented that he felt like he had seen me before. I said I felt the same and expected that round of, "where did you study?", "Did you go to this camp?", but instead he said, "maybe at the strip joints? Do you hang out near the brothels ever?" I was speechless for a second. I think I responded something about if he had seen me there I would have been talking to the girls working there about their lives, not mingling with the men there to use them. I walked silently away as he and his buddies talked getting weed for a friend who just got a new video game and wanted to waste away fro the next few days after his mother came to visit. His words threw me into this stream of thought I wasn't expecting as we were surrounded of the natural beauty of Vienna.

From his other comments that he was merely being a thoughtless jokester and I even chose to believe that he didn't join the throngs of sex-tourists who support this life-killing system that always walks hand in hand with outright slavery. But, my feelings about the sex industry are so strong that even to joke about the existence of the brothels here in Vienna made my heart sink. I remembered the Romanian immigrant, who was leaving her work place at a brothel when she was set on fire by an un-known man. She still is in a coma in critical condition. Of the orphans I had spent time with in Moldova, knowing that some of them would very likely to be end up in those brothels without intervention.

Later in the evening I heard enough other conversation from another guy to want to do him critical damage by the way he was talking about women. All the while his current sleeping companion (of the week apparently) sat quietly under his arm. I wanted to tell her that she deserved to be with someone who actually liked women and valued her as a person.

Despite the fact that Vienna hast been called the best place to live in the world it is not true for all of her inhabitants. The realities of life will always be filled, either externally or internally with scarcity. People will forever grasp for the feeling of fullness, of completeness. Many have no scruples in using others to find that ever-unattainable fix. The wealth of the city clearly does not make her people immune. One only needs to see the headlines of the latest scandals, or the latest bragging of one's neighborhood megalomaniac.

But, as a believer in Christ, I know I don't have to play this Life-boat game of devaluing other people to survive the scarcity of this life. So, how do I respond to the comfortable, upper-middle class, young people who have been taught to take all the can get - as long as with the next breath they talk about alternative fuel sources and morally consider which groups are freedom fighters and which are terrorist groups? I know they are grasping, and for them I want to show them life made complete in Christ, but what about the people they're stepping on, or at least supporting the people who do?

Witness.

Just before 3 pm on 6 May 2010 I was walking down the pedestrian zone of the 10th district toward Reumannplatz Looking for C&A department store on the left side of the street. At first I was looked down the side street to the left to see if C&A was on that street (it is not). As was about to cross the street over the entrance for Keplerplatz U-Bahn station when movement caught my eye across the pedestrian walk way from me. I saw a man of average height in a black shirt and jeans pushing and hitting a small woman toward the corner of the building across from me. She had on a black silk had scarf in the style Turkish women wear. When he began to kick her in the stomach I realized that they were not just fighting but that he was angrily beating her. She had her head down and was being very submissive while trying to get out of the way of his blows. There were a few women at this point who were reaching for her. I could not understand anything they were saying and I could not run across to help because an ambulance was about to pass by and then the light changed. I did yell, “stop!” At that point the man began to run the opposite direction of me, and three men who also looked Turkish began to chase after him. I tried to decide if I should stay to help once the light changed or if there were enough concerned people closer to the scene. I prayed that justice would be done and thanked God for being a God who hears the cries of the oppressed, but I closed my eyes as compassion overwhelmed me and I lost sight of the woman who was attacked.

I crossed the road and saw that the men were successful in catching the perpetrating man. They had him pinned in an alcove of a side door of a cafe or something close to the corner where the incident occurred. There was a small crowd looking on. I confirmed that the man who had hit the woman was taller than me, black hair, dark complexion. I think he was Turkish from what I could hear, but I do not know. His shirt had writing on the front, but I didn’t not see it clearly. One man in particular seemed to want to hold him there and seemed to be questioning the man. I could not understand what they were saying. The perpetrator looked very angry. I asked a man closer than me but he had not seen enough to tell me anything. After a minute apparently they decided to let him go because he squirmed away and went right past me. No one chased him again.

After coming back from C&A, which is a block away, I saw the police talking to the woman who was attacked near where the incident had happened and decided to give my information as a witness.