Who would have thought that such quick and steep descent into raw evil could have happened, as it has happned in Kenya just a few years ago during a national election. Old tribal wrongs and grievances were remembered; forgivenss and mercy was scarce on the ground. Some would argue that it’s always been thus, as  elsewhere in the world, if only an inch or two beneath the surface of ‘civility.’ Violence born of poverty, greed, corruption, injustice, lust and fear, the kinds of things I find too often in my own heart, all there.

There's a Rift Valley in Africa where aeons ago the earth was twisted and wrenched. The rift goes right down from the Middle East, south through Africa. Just so, there's the rift of evil that goes right through the universe. As Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, imprisoned for many years in the Gulag Islands of Siberia in the days of the USSR, use to point out, there is a line of evil that goes right down through the centre of the heart; my own heart too, and dare I say, yours.

O that God would deliver us from the enemy within as well as the evil that circles and threatens from without.