As I've written before, Philip Yancey is my favorite author, bar none. And my favorite book of his is "Rumors of Another World." The theme, as I see it, is that we are so busy looking for the hand of God on this earth that we miss it, it's right before our eyes. He tells many great stories to bring home this point, but one always sticks out to me. I'll paraphrase and quote below:

For the next two and a half years, South Africans listened to reports of atrocities coming out of the TRC (Truth and Reconciliation Commission) hearings. The rules were simple, if a white policeman or army officer voluntarily faced his accusers, confessed his crime, and fully acknowledged his guilt, he could not be tried and punished for that crime...At one hearing, a policeman named van de Broek recounted an incident when he and other officers shot an eighteen year old boy and burned the body, turning it on the fire like a piece of barbeque meat in order to destroy the evidence. Eight years later van de Broek returned to the same house and seized the boy's father. The wife was forced to watch as policemen bound her husband on a woodpile, poured gasoline over his body, and ignited it. The courtroom grew hushed as the elderly woman who had lost first her son and then her husband was given a chance to respond...She said she wanted van de Broek to go to the place where they burned her husband's body and gather up the dust so she could give him a decent burial...Mr. van de Broek took all my family away from me, and I still have a lot of love to give. Twice a month, I would like for him to come to my ghetto and spend a day with me so I can be a mother to him...he is forgiven by God, and I forgive him too. I would like to embrace him so he can know my forgiveness if real. Spontaneously, some in the courtroom began singing "Amazing Grace..."

van de Broek never heart it as he fainted on the spot. As Yancey writes, "justice was not done that day, something beyond justice took place." The hand of God broke into our world and touched a life, changed it into something it never dreamed it could be. Just like the quote I read today in "The Shaping of Things to Come," "Do not call people back to where they were, do not call them to where you are. You must have the courage to go with them to a place that neither you nor they have ever been before."