So you think your life is hard...

Soon after I'd finished preaching on Sunday, in a Syriac Catholic church in Baghdad, a congregation were being held hostage by six al-Qaeda gunmen. They'd seen their priest shot before them. The church was surrounded by Iraqi security forces, and they must have known that the outcome would only have been bloody. In the event the troops stormed the building, the terrorists exploded their bomb-vests and grenades and presumably opened fire - with the result that something like 50 worshippers were killed and more injured. Canon Andrew White reports one little girl running out crying, "They've killed my Daddy, they've killed my Daddy!" The avowed aim of this al-Qaeda group is kill all Christians or drive them out of Iraq.

On Monday evening Andrew White was interviewed on Radio 4's World Tonight programme. You can hear it at 30.53 minutes into http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00vkwlz/The_World_Tonight_01_11_2010/ . 

Andrew White (FRRME website)

He said, "There's literally not one Christian in Baghdad that's not been affected." He says to his church, the largest in Iraq, "I'm not going. Don't you go... But despite all these things this is the happiest church I've had."

You can see him talking about it on Monday on the FRRME website; it's worth spending a minute and a half watching it. http://www.frrme.org/latest-news

On Facebook today Andrew reported:

"It has been another awful day in Baghdad with over 20 serious bombings, more of our people killed. Then one of our young people said to me, 'It may all be awful but Jesus is walking with me all the time.' For us it is not theory Jesus is indeed walking with us all the time."