The atrocities seem endless. The recent attacks in Paris claimed 17 lives. More than 100 school children were gunned down in Pakistan last month. And closer to home, a little girl was thrown off a Florida bridge last week, allegedly by her own father.
The danger is reading the deadly headlines and falling into despair. Thinking God has abandoned us as the bodies keep piling up.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if no one hunted down their neighbor with a gun, a knife or a bomb? If people calmly debated and shook hands, agreeing the future must be better, especially for the next generation? And if no one ever dared harm a child?
In the fallen world we inhabit, the chances of such a utopia coming about are slim to none. The horrors were launched with Cain smashing Abel’s head with a rock. Things have gone steadily downhill since then.
Some people say a loving God would intervene. Whenever someone viciously wielded a gun, he’d stop their hand. If a thug decided to blow up a building, God would ensure the bomb didn’t detonate.
It’s a tempting scenario indeed, but then we’d be hapless marionettes dancing on a string — with God as the puppet master.
God created us with freedom — and some people do marvelous things with it, like establishing hospices for the poor, sitting at the bedsides of the wounded and treating children with tremendous tenderness.
Others make a big sorry mess of it, gunning down innocents, beating up toddlers, spreading madness and mayhem across the globe.
But God is still trying to convey his love to us, although many turn a deaf ear. Even Christ’s friends missed the message because they had — as the Gospels put it — “hardened their hearts.”
A hardened heart means you’re wearing invisible armor. You never give money to a beggar because he might be gaming you.
You don’t dare tell someone “I love you” because maybe they won’t say it back. If someone wrongs you, that’s an incentive to enact a brutal payback.
Fortunately, not everyone has a heart of stone. Many hold tight to the message conveyed in the Bible, “God is love.” And we encounter him through other people.
Remember that time you were on the brink of despair, and someone sat beside you and took your hand? Remember the night someone bruised you to the core, and a friend helped put your heart back together again? That was God reaching out to you.
My sister invited me to visit her, but I couldn’t make the trip. When I asked about taking a rain check, she wrote back, “You’ll always have a bed here.” Meaning, of course, that no matter what, she’s there for me.
God always has a place for us, too. He tenderly seeks out all the lambs, including the desperate and the down-and-out, the lonely and the lost — and yes, even the vicious and the violent.
He came into the world and we pinned him to a cross — but that didn’t stop his love. Nor will the horrendous things we do to each other — or the headlines in tomorrow’s paper.
