Shattered World

Look at these pictures. At these faces. Look at them hard. Type their content into Google and look at the images you see. 

And I ask you: 

Is this okay?

If you're anything like me, you live comfortably in the American upper middle-class. You live the American Dream. 

I look around me and I see thousands of people just like me. I see people running around town this time of year, filling their shopping carts with the best deals they can find. I see people rummaging through the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales to get the latest electronics and portable devices. I see people stuffing their refrigerators with food for the holidays. I see families laughing together and attending Christmas parties in ugly sweaters with gifts to exchange tucked under their arms. 

I see people just like me. Living a delusion. 

This American Dream of prosperity, health, abundance, and wealth we live... It isn't real. 

We live in a fantasy world and some of us like it that way. Others are simply naive. Some of us know what's going on in the world around us, across the globe, across town, across the street, but we don't want to hear it. We don't want to hear it because it dampens our high of happiness and health and riches. So we choose to bury our head in the sand. We distract ourselves with the pleasures our fantasy world has to offer. Fancy dinners, elaborate concertos, high-class museums, luxurious resort getaways. We distract ourselves and shelter our happiness like a trophy in a glass case. 

We don't want to think about the children being beaten and bruised in their homes every day. The young girls and boys being sold into the sex trafficking industry and the women selling their bodies to men in the dark alleys of our city streets or in pornography film studios. The refugees displaced from their homes and from all that they know. The victims of war attacks losing their family, their possessions, everything they own. The impoverished children falling ill from disease and malnutrition. The mothers and fathers who have no more tears left to cry as they watch the lives taken from their young children too soon. The men and women who have defended our freedoms now penniless on our streets with no more than a bag full of belongings to their name. The teenager pregnant and alone, seeking to abort the precious life conceived and formed within her body by the hands of a real and living and loving God. The Christians crucified, beheaded, raped, tortured, burned alive for the sake of not denying their faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. The soldiers of ISIS and their families, lost and so blind but still so deeply loved by our Father in Heaven, our Savior of grace Who died for their sins. The silent screams of their souls for help with every slice of their knives and every shot of their guns as they wander so blind by darkness toward a future of damnation and suffering, torment and grief in a lake of fire for eternity. 

But we don't want to think about them. We don't want to think about the reality these individuals live every day. 

Until it affects us and our family. 

Maybe I'm the only egoistic human to have done this. But maybe I'm not. 

When did we as believers, as the body of Christ... When did we as humanity, as a culture and society, begin caring more about the turkey on our table, the biggest presents under our Christmas tree, the newest iPhone released by Apple and the latest gossip of celebrities than we do about the orphans and the widows, the poor and the hungry, and the lost souls that are going to spend eternity in Hell. 

When?

When did this happen?

When did we become so selfish, so apathetic, so judgmental, so revengeful and so calloused?

Those who are like me, we can't continue to deny reality until it comes knocking on the doorstep of our own happy little worlds. This American Dream will not last forever and its moment on the scene of time is drawing to a close. 

A new era is dawning and the reality is our world is being shaken. The world in which we live mourns and the haunting cries of those slain continue to ring out throughout the nations. Their cold blood runs like a scarlet thread through our hearts, woven into the fabric of our humanity. Lives are lost, innocent, as our world is shattered with war and terror and violence and threats. Blood is on the hands of men so devoted to their religion but so sincerely lost. So blinded to the Truth. And we mourn. A darkness has covered our land and we desperately need a Light to break forth and bring hope to the broken-hearted. To penetrate through the cloud of darkness that has rested upon our world and upon the hearts of men that they may see the Truth that can set them free and give them an eternal hope. 

We live in this world. Beyond our American upper-class, this is the world in which we live right now. Here in this moment. Here in this time. 

And the Church has a decision to make. The Church has center-stage. People are hungry and heavy-burdened and are looking for a peace and a security beyond themselves, beyond the government, beyond alliances. All eyes are on us. 

What will we choose in these days of trial? Hatred or Love?

The world has enough hate. 

I choose love. 

This season it's easy to get caught up in the busyness and the festivities of the holidays. So preoccupied by our own little worlds. 

But please let's not hide. Let's not seek escape into our distractions. Let's not misuse the blessings of the Lord as a distraction. Let's not turn our heads away. 

We are living in a crucial time in history and more than ever, we need to pray and to reach out to the world around us in love. 

It might break our hearts. It might bring us to tears. It might make us cry out and question God "Why?" Why so much suffering, why is that not us instead. It might make us beg the Lord to return now. It might someday cost us our own lives for the sake of our faith. 

But the world is looking at us, the Church, the Body of believers. And it's looking for an example of love in a world now that only knows hate. 

Now is not the time to turn a blind eye to the events of the world around us. Now is not the time to hate those who mock and scorn, those who torture and persecute us. 

Now is the time to make a decision. 

May we choose love. Love as the Father loves us and washes every stain and blemish from His Bride with the ransom of His blood... so that we are made clean white as snow to show others the way to His Truth and glory. 

"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him." John 3:16&17