We live in a world where sudden catastrophe can erupt at any time and we are never really ready for it. 9/11 is the symbol for those shocking events that have led to horrible world wide repercussions. It plunged our nation into a mano-mano struggle with Al Qaida and Muslim militants all over the middle east. This long conflict has drained our resources and seriously impacted our standard of living. Brave American soldiers have lost their lives defending our nation’s freedom and fundamental values. But we also have had to contend with natural disasters like the New Orleans deluge, several mammoth tsunamis, and the outbreak of a heat wave in Europe not too long ago that took many lives. There is also the current holocaust occurring in the Democratic Republic of the Congo which actually has been going on for ten years. 4 million human beings have been slaughtered. This is hard to fathom. It has exceeded the casualties in Rwanda as well as the tremendous loss of life in the Darfur area of Sudan. These atrocities are mind boggling. More about the Congo next week.
But for now, let me ask you how you are coping with all these disasters. These calamities and others like them have been portrayed on the nightly newscasts, documentaries have been made and will continue to be made about them, and movies about man’s inhumanity to man abound; but after so much exposure I fear that our nerves have been dulled to the point of insensitivity which is more like a defense mechanism than mere apathy. And through it all there are those who wonder where God is in all this mess.
A crises of trust looms big among those who want to believe that God is still on the throne and is steering a course towards the abolition of evil even in the midst of so much chaos. And I haven’t even touched on our own personal and family issues that prey on our minds.
Personally, I try to fight off my tendency to ignore much of the bad news that impinges on my delicate equanimity, but I confess that I need to care more, pray more and tune out less. Yet having confessed that, I have anchored my soul on this one powerful thought that God can be trusted and that the human condition as bad as it is, has been addressed at the cross of Jesus Christ. Our Lord was not an ET or extraterrestrial alien being who or which patronized us as a primitive life form, but embraced us as God truly in the flesh and made common cause with all of us. Not all choose to respond to such love but for those of us to whom it is given we are blessed in knowing that Jesus is trustworthy because he went as far as it took to atone for our own personal and collective atrocities and gain our confidence-He took the way of the Cross. He didn’t play games with us. He told us that We matter and that we have an unbelievable upside in him. And because of the Cross, someday, soon we believe, all evil will disappear because Satan, the author of evil, was defeated once and for all when Jesus said: “It is finished.” This will become common knowledge when Jesus returns. Even so come Lord Jesus.
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