A Journey To Arms Chapter 1 Summary

Chapter 1 was about a guy remembering back to the fall in 1994 to when he was on a bus early in the morning on his way to work. He was reading his newspaper, when he seems to find everything oddly in place. He looks around and sees his neighbors sleeping, reading or talking very loud. While looking around something inside of him wanted to say “excuse me, friends, but did you know that less than 48 hours ago I was standing in the middle of several thousand corpses in a muddy mass grave in a tiny African country called Rwanda?”, than he starts to wonder how was it like for Jesus, as a man, to be transported in an instant from a horrifically fallen earth of darkness and death to a heavenly country of light and life. He sees himself the same way,
how he experiences moments where he has been transported from a hell on earth to a heaven on earth. How in a matter of hours he traveled from the slippery mud and corpses of mass graves in Rwanda to his seat on the bus.
He was in Kibuye, Rwanda where the killing of the Tutsis took place by the Hutu’s, because they claimed that the Tutsis killed their President and they were coming to slaughter them. Hutu leaders used government military forces, citizen militia and local mobs to start hunting down and killing the Tutsis in the communities. Hundreds of Tutsi men, women and children all ran to the cathedral and the Home St. Jeans complex to hide, but, the governor and mayor ordered that the complex be surrounded, and then he unleashed his army upon the defenseless people with machetes, metal rods, spears and wooden clubs with nails embedded at the head, and killed all the Tutsis insight. He says that when officials are acting like “wolves tearing the prey, shedding blood, destroying lives to get dishonest gain,” the Lord looks for someone to “stand in the breach” to “intervene” and to “seek justice”, that he was too late to stop the killing and that he couldn’t bring the dead back to life but it matters to God whether the evildoers are brought to justice. All the leaders of the massacre had been captured and indicted; they were each sentenced for 10 to 25 years in
prison.

Chapter 2 was about how the mind often works when it comes to maintaining an interest in the reality of injustice in our world, it mentions a list of widely observed injustices such as; abusive child labor, abusive police or military, child pornography, child prostitution, corrupt seizure or extortion of land, detention or disappearance without charge or trial, extortion or withholding of wages, forced prostitution, forced migration, genocide and much more. Then it speaks about preparing our mind for action, how the Bible declares that the world is fallen, sinful, and that it needs for salvation and justice. Biblical Christians understand that Christ has called us to be his witnesses to the uttermost parts of a very dark world, a dark world of injustice, preparing our mind for action in the world means coming to grips with the notion that the world we are sent into as salt and light is a world that needs salt and light precisely because, among other things, it is full of the corruption and darkness of injustice.