There's no room for foul language on this blog.

On my last day in Lima, I went with some friends to visit El Museo de la Nación.  This is essentially Peru's museum where they put all things museum worthy that won't go in a history museum, an art museum, or a chocolate and pisco museum.

The last thing that we were able to see before the museum closed was an entire floor of the museum that was dedicated to chronicling the rise of The Shining Path, a terrorist group that was founded in 1970, and went on terrorizing the country until the early 1990s. The country's attitude towards the group is still slightly undefined. While it would appear that the majority here views them positively as a terrorist group, others hold them to be revolutionaries.

These definitions are still hazy because people don't talk about what happened. The wounds are too fresh, and chances are, with how widespread and violent the Shining Path grew, whoever you're talking to about this has been directly affected in some way. I've been in this country for 6 weeks now, I have discussed politics, religion, and everything in-between with the locals, but not one of them have brought up terrorism.

The exhibit in the museum was sobering, disturbing, and somehow very very inspiring and beautiful. Perhaps it's the aspiring journalist in me, or perhaps it's my insatiable desire to see people be liberated and reconciled that made all of this resonate so strongly, but I was beyond touched by this exhibit.

There was one image in particular will always stick with me. It shouts the gospel. The more I've lived out these ever so wise twenty-one years that I have acquired, the more I've seen that the whole earth, even in it's rawest, most gruesome form, shouts the glory of our Savior. 

El Hijo de Perra (use google translate. there's no room for foul language on this blog.)

Pictured above is a policeman looking in horror at a dog that has been hanged with wire on the side of a street lamp. Many referred to the communist leader of China at the time, Teng Saio Ping as an "hijo de perra" and hanged dogs in the street to represent their extreme distaste for him and the way he was affecting the country.

I stared at this image for a while, mostly because the dog in the picture looks exactly like Paul, the dog that my family got for Mother's Day. I began to think about how sad this was, that this dog did nothing to deserve this. In the picture, the dog looks almost like he's smiling. It's the same face that Paul gets when it's dinner time and he begins to start jumping up and down. 

He was robbed of the life of milk bones and over turned garbage cans that he deserved.  He was innocent, and died at the expense of many.

Then, my thoughts shifted to Christ. It took them long enough to get there. I began to think about how many crucifixes that I've seen in this very Catholic country, and how not a single one of them left me as pain-filled as this one. Depicted on the crucifix is my God, crucified. An innocent, sinless  King, who died so that I could live. This dog did the same for the people of Peru, but on an incomparably smaller scale.

Jesus died for the good of all humanity. 

The Lord used this disturbing image of terrorism to stir my affections upwards and want to see him in each gory and mangled subsequent image, and I was able to.

Our God is in the business of true liberty and restoration.

There was a quote at the beginning of the exhibit that I particularly enjoyed:

"No podemos encontrar la reconciliación si no conocemos la verdad."

(We cannot find restoration if we do not know the truth.)

This quote was from the first meeting held to stitch the country back together in 2004. The same goes with life. We cannot find restoration, true reconciliation and rendering, unless we know the truth. I happen to be of the school of thought that there is an ultimate truth out there, and I made it my personal mission long ago to be constantly on a search for truth.

Seek and you will find my friends, there is to greater adventure than this.