Greek authorities have charged a 26-year-old man from Afghanistan with manslaughter, robbery, and weapons law violations. Investigators say he admitted a role in her death, placed her body in the suitcase, moved it to the vacant building where a homeless man later discovered it, and used her bank cards afterward to withdraw money. A replica pistol and a knife were recovered from his home. Police Scotland, Britain's National Crime Agency, and Greek police are working the case together, with American authorities also assisting.
Ross was known to family and friends as Lisa. For twenty years she belonged to City on a Hill church in Edinburgh, and she traveled to Greece again and again to work with nongovernmental organizations that serve abused women and support refugee centers. Lead pastor Peter Anderson told reporters, "We have lost a precious church member Lisa. She was a member of our church for twenty years, and a very precious, precious girl. It was a real tragic loss." He said she carried "a big passion for missions" that took her, year after year, into the hard and unglamorous places most people never see.
Twenty years of Saturdays and summers given to people who owed her nothing — refugee women in a foreign port city, the abused, the displaced. She did not do it for a headline. She did it, her pastor said, out of a passion planted in her by Christ Himself. And it ended in an abandoned building, zipped into a suitcase, at the hands of a young man desperate enough to spend her money after he had taken her life. That is the sort of sentence a newsroom prints and hurries past. The Book of God does not hurry past it.
"Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints." (Psalm 116:15)
Hear that word, my friend — precious. The world was right to count Lisa Ross precious, right to weep over her. But the verse does not say her death was precious to Edinburgh, or precious to the refugee centers she served, or precious even to the church that loved her for twenty years. It says her death was precious in the sight of the LORD. God does not lose track of His own. He does not misplace a single one who belongs to Him — not in an alley in Kypseli, not zipped in a suitcase, not anywhere on this groaning earth. What man calls senseless, God calls seen.
That is not sentiment. That is the ground under every true missionary who has ever left a safe country for a hard one. Paul told the Corinthians so plainly it reads like it was written for this very case: "We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord" (2 Corinthians 5:8). Death has no power to separate a believer from Christ. It only delivers her into His presence sooner than the rest of us. That is what gave Lisa Ross the nerve, Saturday after Saturday, to walk into refugee shelters and hard districts most of Edinburgh would never visit. She was not reckless. She was free — free from the fear of dying because she belonged, body and soul, to a Savior who had already beaten death at the grave.
You may never board a plane for Athens. But you will die, my friend, and so will everyone you love, and this story leaves the same question at your door that it left at hers: whose are you? Christ went to a cross the officials of His own city called senseless, so that anyone who trusts Him could stop fearing the end of this life and start living the one that has no end. Lisa Ross is not lost. She is found — more found now than she has ever been.