Naridon sits in the Kamaru Chawai Ward of Kauru Local Government Area, a farming community in Nigeria's Southern Kaduna region where nearly every household is Christian. Witnesses said the attackers moved house to house, shooting those they found and chasing others into the surrounding bush. Among the dead were five siblings from one family, Deborah, Friday, Yusuf, Yunana, and Irimiya Emmanuel, whose parents had escaped the raid and returned home to find all five of their children gone. Local youth leader Ishaya Dawa said soldiers and police did not reach the village until daylight, hours after the shooting had stopped.
The Nigerian Army arrested a 48-year-old Fulani Muslim man on August 3 in connection with the killings, and President Bola Tinubu ordered the pursuit of the militia responsible. Kaduna State Governor Uba Sani has faced mounting pressure from Christian advocacy groups, including Christians in Politics, which called the massacre "an act of terror" and demanded that his government finally protect Southern Kaduna's believers rather than merely mourn them after each new grave is dug. The United States government has since pressed Mr. Tinubu's administration to confront what it termed "rampant violence against Christians" across Nigeria's Middle Belt.
Southern Kaduna has buried its people this way for years now, farming villages struck in the dark by gunmen widely blamed on armed Fulani militia, the survivors given a funeral, a government statement, and little else before the next attack comes. The Southern Kaduna Peoples Union called Naridon "another tragic reminder of the vulnerability of rural communities," a sentence that could have been written after almost any of the raids that came before it.
What Naridon Asks of Every One of Us
A father does not need a sermon to tell him something is wrong with the world when he comes home to find five children gone in a single night. He needs to know that the God who made those children saw what happened to them, and that their blood did not fall on deaf ears. Scripture does not flinch from that question. When Cain struck down his brother in the field, the Lord did not shrug at it as the way of a fallen world. He said the ground itself was crying out.
"The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit." (Psalm 34:18)
That is not a poem for a sympathy card. It is a promise addressed to people exactly like the Emmanuel family, kneeling in the ash of their own house. God does not stand off at a distance from Naridon's grief, unmoved and unbothered. He draws near to it. He always has, from Abel's blood in the ground to the martyrs John saw crying out from beneath the altar in Revelation, asking how long the Lord would wait to judge and avenge their blood on the earth. Vengeance belongs to Him, not to any man with a rifle, and He has never once forgotten a name written on a grave.
My friend, if this world's cruelty is real enough to burn down a village in Kaduna, then the gospel that answers it had better be more than a comfort for the comfortable. It is not. Jesus Christ was Himself hunted, beaten, and killed by men who thought their violence would be the last word. It was not. He rose. And because He rose, the believers gunned down at midnight in Naridon are not lost to the dark, they are held. That hope is not reserved for Nigeria's persecuted church alone. It is offered to you, wherever you read this, in whatever comfort or danger you presently live. The same Christ who is near to the brokenhearted in a burned village in Kaduna State is near to the brokenhearted anywhere on this earth, and He is not finished setting things right.