a call to prayer

The following is part of a letter from Fouad Masri, president and founder of Crescent Project. He sends out a monthly letter telling people how to pray for Muslims:

Muslims are tired of oppression and many are seeking freedom. It is clear that Islam has failed as a political and a social system. Muammar al-Qaddafi, who has funded the building of mosques and the propogation of Islam throughout the Western world, is now using his guns and jets on his own people. Why? Because political Islam is all about gaining and keeping power.
There are revolutions and demands for change in many Muslim countries, including Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Lebanon, Yemen, Bahrain, Iran and more. If it were just in one or two countries, I agree it would be a local issue. But it's not. The entire Islamic world is in unrest, and the people losing the most sleep are the ones in charge.

There are three reasons I say this is a revolution against Islam, not just against government.
1) The people are tired of ruthless, self-important rulers. Yet, this is the core nature of Islamic rule and politics dating back to the beginning with Mohammad. Islam demands a strong ruler to keep the population under control. It has often been said that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. This has never been more evident than in the Islamic world. At last, Muslims around the world are realizing there is a better way.
2) Unemployment is rampant in most of these countries and the people want something done about it. This is perhaps one of the most cited reasons for the unrest, yet few look into the cause of the poor economy. Muslims tend to have a well-developed sense of fate (a core Islamic belief), and therefore often simply accept their poor conditions as the will of Allah. Perhaps true, but many are now seeing that the wealth and corruption of the Islamic leadership is repugnant when millions live in squalor and are simply told to accept it.
3) Many Muslims have seen and tasted freedom for the first time. With access to the Internet, millions of Muslims around the world have access to new ideas, including an understanding of freedom. Under Islam, there is no freedom. Every behavior, every thought is to be controlled by Islam. Today, many people are seeing the beauty of freedom and want to experience it for themselves.

There is a major wave of awakening on the social level. I ask that you look beyond the headlines and see the spiritual dilemma Muslims are in. They need a savior, and He is responding. I know of a Shiite who prayed and committed his life to Christ yesterday. I know of another Muslim who came to faith in the Middle East. Yet another is exploring the New Testament.
There is a new spiritual hunger in the Muslim world, and we need to pray for Muslims everywhere to meet authentic Christians and hear the Good News of Christ.
Whether freedom wins, or not, we need to pray for Muslims to hear the Gospel. We need to take action and get involved in this timely work. We need to share the hope of Jesus with Muslims.

Auschwitz

If I accidentally stumbled upon the former Auschwitz concentration camp, I might as well assumed that the beautiful red brick buildings were a part of a college campus. However, touring the inside of some of these buildings which have been turned into museums definitely helped to bring me closer to the reality of the dismal place.
I think if there was one word to sum up my experience of Auschwitz it would be numbness. Words cannot adequately describe my feelings that day -first it was the utter lack of emotion I felt or rather didn't feel upon first entering the camp and then I became completely enraptured by the sudden onslaught of suffocating guilt for my lack of emotion and then all this was followed by a confusing mass of jumbled thoughts that began flying through my brain at a hundred miles an hour. If only the tour guide would stop talking and give me a solitary moment to sit on the floor of the gas chamber to gather my thoughts, I thought to myself. It was so difficult for me to convince myself of the atrocity that happened exactly where I was standing. That hundreds of Jews, Gypsies, and other minorities laid cold, naked, starving, beaten, and ill in that tiny room.

execution courtyard

 As I walked across the gas chamber room I had two powerfully competing thoughts. In order to more fully emphatically experience Auschwitz, I had a desperate yearning to feel a small share of the physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional anguish the Holocaust victims endured. The second thought was a very sobering one as I began to realize how I am not all that dissimilar from that Nazi who flipped the switched in that very gas chamber I was standing in. How very humbling and terrifying it is to think that I am no better than Hitler. While all sins are not equal in severity, they are all equal in penalty.

 The torture and humiliation that I pitied the Jews for having to endure is what I deserve to endure. That gas chamber where I was filled with righteous anger is where I belong -it's where we all belong. Touring the former Auschwitz camp was more than just a historical learning moment for me.

For a while I had a very difficult time convincing myself that the Holocaust actually happened. The 40,000 pairs of shoes or the two tons of hair I saw just didn't seem real. Thinking back over this experience, it is very sobering to think about how similar atrocities -maybe not to the same degree or level -are happening all around us all the time. Oftentimes we just choose to ignore them. I let Auschwitz numb me initially but I pray I will never grow numb to the injustice that surrounds me every day.