Desecration
“There is no food. My people need dignity.”
—Bisan, reporting from Gaza, 2025
There’s a woman speaking starvation and siege into a phone.
Named a modern Anne Frank,
though I hear another name, too,
echoing an ancient testament of hunger and survival—
Ruth.
Ruth, who once bent to gather what was left behind.
Ruth, whose entire survival was legal only because the law carved out mercy at the margins.
Leave something.
Leave scraps.
Leave dignity.
That was the deal then.
And now, how far we’ve sunk.
Ruth gleaned.
Bisan documents.
Both do so with worn hands, tired eyes, and empty stomachs.
Bisan is Gazan.
We forget that the God of Abraham
is not owned by one nation—
that He calls the sons of Ishmael and the daughters of Moab His, too.
Ruth came from Moab.
And Moab came from Lot’s daughters—
women so abandoned they believed the world had ended.
We preach sermons about David and never mention
that his blood came from devastation—
incest, famine, poverty, and fire.
And from David’s lineage?
That starving, pain-filled line—
came Jesus.
We say God can use anything for good.
We forget that God already did.
Or maybe we forget to learn from it.
Maybe Bisan is closer to Jesus
than any of us could imagine to be.
So no—I don’t hear just Anne Frank.
I hear Tamar, who risked her body for justice.
I hear Hagar, weeping in the wilderness until God said, I see you.
I hear a nameless widow, baking the last of her flour and oil for a stranger.
I hear Mary of Nazareth, giving birth under empire,
and then fleeing on foot in the night with a newborn and no certainty.
I hear the Canaanite woman, pressing back against Jesus himself, saying,
“Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall.”
And through these women,
I hear His kingdom widen—
while today men collapse into cowardice,
shrinking their godliness into something bloodless and small.
Bisan says:
We are dying.
We are being starved.
And you are watching.
This is what prophecy sounds like.
You don’t need to see a burning bush to hear it—
when you have tents, smoke,
and teeth clenched around truth.
Gaza is being forced into famine
while the world scrolls past.
They call it war.
She calls it weaponized hunger.
I call it—Biblical in magnitude.
Not religious—blasphemous desecration.
Pharaoh hoarded grain and let the people starve.
Rome taxed widows while the temple took its cut.
And Jesus?
He fed the hungry—
to rebuke a system that wouldn’t.
When Bisan says, “My people need dignity,”
I think of Ruth’s hands in the dust.
I think of Mary wrapping a newborn in rags.
I think of Jesus saying, “I was hungry, and you gave me nothing to eat.”
And I think:
If we do not respond,
we are not just complicit—
we are unrecognizable
as parents,
as Americans,
as Christians,
as humans.
Because the lineage of the starving still lives.
And they are still holy.
And they are still speaking.
You can plunder and crush.
You can raise the price and close the gates.
But no mother forgives the one who let her baby starve.
And no Father forgets the cry of His children.