Twenty-six year old Kayla Jean Mueller was trying to make the world a better place by serving as an example of compassion as a Doctors Without Borders aid worker in Syria.
It breaks your heart to see that beautiful smile of hers wiped away brutally by ISIS, a group whose evil acts will never be justified by the Islam they claim to practice.
The truth is, ISIS is nothing but a Middle Eastern horde of thugs and barbarians that murder innocent people to gain notoriety for themselves. They deserve nothing from the rest of humanity except condemnation and swift annihilation.
That day will come, not soon enough, but soon.
In the meantime we will mourn Kayla’s death, and the death of each victim of ISIS’s brutality, and hold their families close to our hearts. And we can also resist the temptation to use these tragic deaths as a platform for condemning Islam as a religion of hate, contrasting it with Christianity as a religion of love.
I have a Muslim friend who is as gentle, loving, and spiritual as anyone I have ever known. I also have Christian, Jewish, Hindu, and Buddhist friends who are the same way.
No doubt there are Muslims who are the opposite of my friend, cut from the same piece of cloth, but entirely different in temperament, religious convictions, and view of the world, just as there are Christians and Jews radically different from the ones I know and love.
It’s the way of human nature and nurture. My brothers and I were born of the same parents, raised in the same home, lived in the same neighborhood, attended the same church, and yet could not be more different, including their giving up church while I went into ministry.
People from similar and even the same backgrounds become adults with different passions and views, something ignored by those who use the tragic deaths we are seeing to make erroneous generalizations about the teachings in the Qu’ran or advice about what other Muslims should say or do about ISIS.
What would be better and more redemptive would be for all of us, especially those of us who are Christian, to trust that every decent person in the world regardless of faith or its absence abhors the actions of ISIS.
Moral consciousness is the bond we all share as human beings, and universal values hold the world together by empowering different nations to unite in the fight against obvious evil.
I believe the actions of ISIS are having this effect. It is becoming universally condemned by all nations. That is what makes its defeat inevitable.
The only thing that can undermine the unity of humanity against it are voices that want to exploit the evil it represents in ways that promote their own political or religious agenda. This is already happening here at home. Zealot political and religious right wingers are trying to divide us as a people by characterizing President Obama as weak, and even anti-Christian, and Islam as inherently evil.
Neither is true, neither does anything to ensure justice is administered, and both deserve to be rejected whenever their exponents dare to speak such distortions of facts and truth.
I cannot imagine what the parents of Kayla Jean Mueller are feeling right now. But I can try to be a better person as a way of showing that her death while trying to do good was not in vain.
It is a small contribution I can make in the fight to defeat the evil that took her life.
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