Consider the brothers

What happens to them is happening to you and me | Mindy Belz

Illustration by Krieg Barrie

If I am a Christian, it means that Jesus Christ communicates his life to me and actually lives in me; the same life of Jesus Christ in me exists also in my brothers. Since we then share the same life—that of Jesus Christ—my brother's life is no longer apart from mine. And that means that I must consider all that happens to my brothers as though it were happening to me. —Jean Daujat, laureate of the French Academy of the Academy of Sciences writing in The Church in Today's Catacombs (1975)

Consider this as though it were happening to you: Amina Muse Ali, an orphan and at age 30 unmarried (for in Somali culture it takes a family to arrange a marriage, sometimes before birth), went to work in 1994 for the UN as a translator. Over the next three years she converted from Islam to Christianity (a dream? a conversation? words translated which later sent her to a Bible for more?). She became an active member of the underground church in Somalia, which experts say may number 75. Two years ago she moved to Gulkayo at the invitation of a friend after the Islamic extremist group al Shabaab invaded the area where she lived near Kismayo.