What a tragedy -- aftershocks continue to roll in China as just this weekend 70,000 more houses collapsed as the ground underneath them moved.
What a horror -- maybe as many as 100,000 people are dead.
What a nightmare -- parents waiting at schools to pick up their children, only instead they are handed a lifeless corpse to carry home, children waiting to be picked up and instead wondering the streets looking for the parents they will never find.
What a joy? What a joy? Are you kidding me? How about what a sickness. Kelly was telling me this morning as we were overcome with such sadness at seeing the above picture and thinking of all that is behind it, that several people smiled this week when she shared her sadness for the victims of the earthquake. Smiled! How, you ask? Why you ask? "Because this means the end times are closer." Translation, in my warped view of how God looks at the world, I should be happy that hundreds of thousands of people are mutilated and killed around the world, because it could meant that I get to go to heaven sooner.
Somehow I don't seem to see that kind of thought process anywhere in the bible; I don't see that anywhere in the heart of Jesus, in his compassion for even those who didn't want anything to do with him, in his tears, in his weeping.
What a sicknesss -- it is a sickness, a corrupted gospel that could result in people who claim to be Christians smiling at the death of children because in their reductionistic, individualistic perversion of the gospel, they might benefit. (Oh, and besides, there are lots of Chinese, and they all look the same anyway -- Kelly read this and asked me to point out that they didn't say this part; this is just my editorial assumption). These people are sick.
Kelly says I can't say what I want to, that they're all going to hell, so I won't. Instead, I'll say, "look close, maybe one of those people who all look the same to you is Jesus."
1 comment:
In the past, I've certainly looked forward to Jesus' second coming -- and I still do. However, I used to be kind of cavalier about disasters, thinking, like my friends, that the more disasters in the world, the better, because perhaps it means that Jesus is coming soon. But I've grown a bit from that, and God has given me a heart that more freely feels the way he does -- and so I am so sad at the disasters, at the tragedies, and pray so hard for the victims and their families. It makes me so sad that so many people do not follow God and then die without one last chance...
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