And I ask this, not in a “what can YOU do” sort of way, though that is a good question. But I ask in a more defeated, “ah, I’m feeling the weight of sin” sort of way.
My Dad just went to India on a business trip. While he was there a bunch of beggars came and started pounding on the windows of the car asking for money. Some of the children didn’t have hands. Apparently their parents cut their hands off so that people would feel more compassion on them and they would bring home more money.
Also while there, he and his associates were taken out to dinner. The waiter brought out the Indian version of Diet Coke instead of the American version and so his boss fired him. My dad said that he felt terrible because it didn’t matter to him which kind of Diet Coke they served.
How is it that I can be sitting here in my warm comfortable house, with my children still connected to all of their limbs? I am feeling the weight of sin very deeply this week.
And then there’s the whole tragedy that my friend has been going through the past four months. Her husband just lost a devastating battle with leukemia, leaving her and their three year old son behind. She has an auto-immune disease and so she can’t even work let alone take care of her own child with out a lot of help. Can you all remember to say a prayer for them?
And a few weeks ago I discovered that my childhood best friend’s father just suffered severe brain damage from Meningitis. He was practically a second father to me growing up. He now has the mentality of a little boy. They need prayer as well.
I know that Christ has conquered the curse of death. I know that it no longer has any hold on us. I know that this world is due to be resurrected in Christ at His second coming, but Lord, how long? How much longer must we be here waiting.
I am very lonely for my home right now.
I think what’s jarring to me about your “state of the cosmos” report is the fact that most of us bop along from day to day not really having much of a longing for re-creation in Christ at his second advent, nor any sense of how comprehensive and radical its effects will (need to) be. The “radical” effects of sin, for most of us, I suspect, are always occurring “over there” somewhere. It’s often hard to connect MY objective condition with those things happening “over there” or with “that other family”. I wonder if we would mourn with those who mourn more appropriately if we had a deeper sense of our fraternity in the guilt and pervasiveness and comprehensiveness of sin.
I also am struck by your post and its content at the radical and utterly gratuitous mercy shed toward me in that my son and wife are, for the time being, alive and healthy.
And, lastly, this discussion makes me think back to an old and pretty morbid post of Rob’s, when he began to reflect on the bittersweet savour of moments spent with Olivia. Sweet because of the marvel of it all; bitter because one of the two of them are likely to die before the other, and leave the other with a collection of inflamed tear ducts.
Maranatha.
Andy