“I
don’t know why I care,” he wrote. “I don’t know why I bother. I check the news.
Bad. All bad. Unless the news is horrible, it’s bad. Why care? Why bother? Why
not just play ‘Angry Birds’ and pretend it doesn’t affect me? It sounds
easier.”
Perhaps
you can relate. I know I do. Violence and hatred rage everywhere. Wars,
skirmishes and suffering flare up where we don’t expect them, and where we do.
Ukraine and Russia. Syria. Iraq. Israel and Gaza. West Africa. Death and
disease abound. Innocents are infected, blown out of the sky, kidnapped, driven
from their homes, shot in the crossfire. In some places, the bad guys seem to
be winning — if we can even figure out who the bad guys are. It’s too
complicated, too confusing, too depressing. It’s tempting to tune it out.
Most
people do.
Not
my friend, however. Despite his frustration and discouragement, I know he won’t
stop reading, watching, caring and praying. He’s an intelligent and
compassionate young man, for one thing. He’s concerned about world affairs. He
makes a point of keeping up with what’s happening and tries to understand it,
unlike many others.
Most
important, as a child of God, he’s in touch with the mind and heart of God, who
so loved the world that He gave His only Son to redeem it. If He loved even
those who hated Him, we must do likewise.
“The
one who does not love does not know God, for God is love,” the Apostle John
teaches. “By this the love of God was manifested in us, that God has sent His
only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through Him. In this is
love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the
propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love
one another. No one has seen God at any time; if we love one another, God
abides in us, and His love is perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in
Him and He in us, because He has given us of His Spirit. We have seen and
testify that the Father has sent the Son to be the Savior of the world” (1 John
4:8-14, NASB).
It’s
only His love, through His Spirit, that changes a broken world. By His grace,
He chooses to use us, if we submit to Him. His love is more than enough to make
up for our lack of it.
Another
young person I know returned recently from a youth mission trip to Amsterdam,
the Dutch capital. She and the group arrived there the same week in July that
Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was shot down over
Ukraine, killing all 283 passengers and 15 crew. Two-thirds of the passengers
were Dutch. People on the streets of Amsterdam were just beginning to
experience the shock of the tragedy as the youth team walked through the city
and distributed more than 6,000 copies of the Gospel of John.
Some
people they encountered rejected the small gifts of truth. Like many Europeans,
the Dutch consider themselves secular and post-Christian. But many accepted it—
many more than the Amsterdam-based Christian worker helping the young people
expected — and they began reading it. Perhaps they were looking for something
to hold onto, something to hope in.
While
interacting with them, my young acquaintance learned some things about herself.
She realized she wasn’t as tolerant, as patient or as loving as she thought she
was.
“But
through learning all these ‘I am nots,’ I learned who God is,” she said.
Distributing the Gospel, “even if they were going to reject it a second later,
is so much more important than my comfort. … I learned to really care for and
love the Dutch people.”
So
it is with all who seek to follow Him. It’s not who we are; it’s who He is. And
He has overcome the world.
(Explore
ways to follow Him into the world at http://going.imb.org/
)
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