During my march down the road of life, I have watched the "Troubles" and the IRA. My family had always been deeply Nationalist. One of my brothers spent most of his teenage years planning make-believe missions for the IRA. From my parents marching against "Bloody Sunday" and the "Hunger Strikes", visits to an IRA pub in West Belfast, seeing Ian Paisley marching in East Belfast, to finally living in Northern Ireland for 3 years.
My childhood notions of the situation in Northern Ireland was simple - the foreign English needed to be kickout of "our country." My childhood family lived in the US so this was the first stretch. The second was how to understand Ulster Protestants. In the world of Irish-American propaganda, they were dupes of the British. They were pawns that were being used used in a typical divide and conquer strategy that the British had used all over the globe. Besides, we believed that Northern Ireland was an artificial state designed to save the largest industrial city in Ireland for the greedy hands of Whitehall.
When I professed myself a follower of the Lord Jesus in my later teens, I realized that I had to find out more about Protestants. During my college years, I started regularly attending Protestant churches. I also visited Northern Ireland both Nationalist and Unionist areas. I visited both commnities and learned much to dispel old myths and a foundation to better understand the complexities of the province in the future.
When we came to live outside of Belfast, we came to know in much greater depth the people of Northern Ireland. I worked in a high technology company. Within the company no one could care about anyone's religion, but because most graduates from the University are now Catholic, it was the same within our company. On the other side, our family attended the Reformed Presbyterian Church of Ireland in Newtownabbey where our Christian friends were generally Unionist. In Northern Ireland, you can tell someone's background by their first name - our children all had Nationalist names. In church, this did not in any way change the wonderful way we were treated or how are friends regarded us.
In short, the people of Northern Ireland are cherished by my whole family. We hope that the announcement from the IRA will close a bloody chapter in the history of Ireland. We pray for peace and that the gospel of Lord Jesus would be spread throughout the whole island of Ireland and within the United Kingdom.
