10-47am

As I have watched the events unfold of the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, it has raised painful memories of my past. On my bookshelf, is a scrapbook, I seldom pick up. This morning I did. I went cold.  I made this scrapbook as a teenager. I called it “Rhodesia’s Last Years” and it covered newspaper articles of several of the tragedies that happened during the war years.

I was a young teenager, witnessing these events, not understanding the politics behind them – only seeing the enormous tragedy of each of them. The contents page, in my own 16 year old handwriting,  outlines the main stories…

The first Air Rhodesia Viscount disaster happened on Sunday 3rd September 1978…

More information came out about it…

As search parties rushed to try and find out what happened, a gruesome discovery came to light….

The emotion that this article raises in me is extremely painful. The cold fear that gripped out hearts. The terrorists would stop at nothing. The brutality and senselessness of it all is overwhelming…

Eight people survived a harrowing night, trudging more than 10km over rough terrain.

Five months later, on Monday February 12th 1979, a second Air Rhodesia Viscount plane was shot down by a terrorist missile. There were no survivors…

Five members of the Boyd family from New Zealand were on that flight…

So very tragic. No one was every ‘bought to book’ for these brutal murders.

It’s nearly impossible to try and make sense out of these tragedies. Where is God? These are questions asked down through thousands of years…

Psalm 94:
3 How long, Lord, will the wicked, how long will the wicked be jubilant?
4 They pour out arrogant words;  all the evildoers are full of boasting.
5 They crush your people, Lord; they oppress your inheritance.
6 They slay the widow and the foreigner;  they murder the fatherless.
7 They say, ‘The Lord does not see; the God of Jacob takes no notice.’
22 But the Lord has become my fortress, and my God the rock in whom I take refuge.
23 He will repay them for their sins  and destroy them for their wickedness;  the Lord our God will destroy them.

We live in a brief moment in time – a split second – within the eternity of forever. The Bible is a single cross-stitch in a colossal tapestry. We get a fragment of what happened – God’s plan is so much bigger -” no eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived….” There will be no easy answers this side of eternity – if there were we wouldn’t be living by faith.