Fabrice

When a 23-year-old Premiership footballer collapses in front of tens of thousands of people, a game is abandoned and teammates call for prayer for him following a technical death from cardiac arrest the worlds of ministry and sports chaplaincy feel very close together.

Fabrice Muanga's life, we all agree, is more important than his footballing life.  Football, even at its highest level, is nowhere near as important as life and death.  This one man's trouble has stopped thousands in their tracks and brought an encouraging humanity into the business whirl of top-level football.

But.

The beauty of what has happened in response to Fabrice's heart attack is a reason to think harder about humanity than we first imagine.  In this connection it has been passingly commented that Muanga's father came to Britain as a refugee from Congo.  From this upheaval Fabrice grew into a fine student as well as an excellent footballer.  And if he'd stayed in Congo?

Over ten years of the internal strife in that land it is estimated over five million people have died and hundreds of thousands have been raped.  Under the floodlights one man's hurt was shared by thousands but in the Congolese rainforests thousands' hurt has, too often, not been observed or shared by anyone.

This is not a fair world, though sometimes (as here) gems of kindness gleam within it.  We are about to relive the God-Man's journey to a hill where a crowd watched, a Saviour died, but more truly he was the one who was watching them - "Father forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing".  Never a truer, kinder, or more heartfelt observation by one man. 

By one man watching a dying crowd.