When You’re Trying to Make Sense of All the Injustice

This by no means is a political statement, it is simply encouraging you to ask, what can I do?

 

You know, I get it. I get that you don’t want a bunch of nameless faces coming into the U.S. You don’t know them and you don’t know where they came from. You really can’t help yourself but to feel this way.

It’s easy to respond from a place of fear and it’s pretty effortless to ignore the issues when you don’t let your heart get involved. When you keep people at a distance, when you keep them nameless, you can shrug off their needs. You can scroll past all the photos of bodies washed up along the shore…when you choose not to feel.

Someone needs to have enough courage to not turn away.

When we begin to understand that it could have been us. It could have been our family running for our lives. What makes us so different? Where we were born. Somehow we were lucky enough to be born in North America.

Change will happen when we begin to feel and be moved with compassion.

Look, I get it. I want to turn the news off. Delete Facebook, just to silence it all.

I have to ask, why was I born into ease while the rest of the world struggles to even feed their children?

Why do my children get to lay their heads down in a warm safe bed while another mom has to say goodbye to her daughter who was taken into sex trafficking?

What are we doing church?

The apathy will stop when we begin to see each person through the eyes of Jesus. When we begin to see each person as the image bearer of the God Most High.

I finally got it. It all clicked when my husband spent 5 days in the refugee camp in Germany. He heard their stories. His heart was gripped as they shared how they walked through countries and left family members for safety. Many of these men had been tortured for their faith. Beaten and whipped for proclaiming Jesus. They all had a story and they all had a name. And because of an attack on their country, forcing them to leave, they have found themselves colliding into a God that cares about their every need. These men have certainty been victims of great evil but it is overwhelmingly clear that God has a great and glorious plan.

I can no longer sit back. The faces in the crowd have names. They have stories. The bodies washed up on shore have a name and the thousands of people who want to come into our country each have a story, just like I do.

Our response needs to be more than changing our Facebook profile picture. It needs to be more than venting our frustration to our social media fan club. It requires a true response. The world is waiting for a positive response but all that seems to seep out of the church is what we won’t do.

Talk is cheap. Words mean nothing unless there is action behind them.

It’s more than this one issue. Orphans, sex trafficking, homeless, the forgotten, the helpless…

The world is groaning for the church to wake up and do something.

When the faces become more than a number that’s when we will begin to change the world. That’s when the church will make a difference.

“Fear not” is seen 365 times in scripture. 365 times! Do you think the Lord was trying to say something?

Have we forgotten, “perfect love cast out all fear.”

Maybe we have been given so much in-order to love so much and to give to a world that’s in need.

We serve a God who gives without measure and yet we think we deserve to hold back from others because it might be too risky. Loving others is always risky.

“So as He stepped ashore, He saw a huge crowd and had compassion on them, because they were like a sheep without a shepherd. Then He began to teach them many things.” Mark 6:34

Two words caught my attention “He saw.”

It’s time for us to see.

Let’s put away our boxing gloves and sit and look at the faces. Look at their eyes. Go and look. See their pain. See their need. Look at all the orphans. Really look. Get on a website and scroll through the thousands of pictures of children that need a home.

Go and see the bodies washed up on the shores. Imagine that was your son or daughter. Would you sit and do nothing?

Trust me when you do that, you will be moved with compassion to do more than post your debate on Facebook.

You will be moved with compassion like Jesus. The Holy Spirit will begin speaking when you silent your fear and feel what He feels.

Maybe we have been given the victory of the Cross to stand in for a world that is hurting and in need of a Savior.

It’s time for us to see and do something.

“But be doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.” James 1:22