Someone the other day asked me if I thought the world was more evil when God brought the flood over the whole earth than it is today. After I thought briefly I had to answer “no.” Not that I could effectively gather any quantitative evidence suggesting the world is more evil or at least as evil today than it was during the time of Noah. Just looking around in the last week there have been shootings of police officers, kidnapped children, terrorist bomb going off in a Russian airport, and other tragedies headlining the news. No doubt theses are terrible atrocities plaguing our world. However, I see these acts of evils not as the root problem, but symptoms of the disease.While there are many problems to point to and not enough fingers to point, I believe a big issue we are dealing with is community. We no longer have communities or tight knit support systems. Our neighborhoods have broken down, our families have broken down, parenting, marriage and siblings have been broken down, we are only left with weekly clubs and court ordered parental visitations. We have glorified the self to such a degree that if anything or anyone opposes our self we cast them off. In such a world in which the self rules we have plenty of self-identity, but no one to identify with. Our relationships have been broken at a very fundamental level. Parents are now too burdened by the needs of their children that they cast them off. Children are burdened by the demands of their teachers, so they cast them off. Teachers are burdened by a system, spouses are burdened with sacrifice.
He have focused on self and pursuing only the single dream of wealth that we have thrown away our leaders, heroes, role models, loves, companions, mentors, mentees, parents, children and friends.
Living on the Westside of Indianapolis working at a church I have seen too many of our children at age 5 deal with absent parents, dispersed siblings, physical wounds, and deep emotional scars. Before many of the children know how to write their name they have been taught that people are selfish and look out only for themselves.
I think if we ever want to improve our society we need to focus on family, marriage, and friendship. We need to focus on community and relationships. We have to learn what it is to be selfless. Certainly this starts all with Jesus Christ. Jesus lived not for himself but for others to the point of laying himself down.
It is not that our self does not matter, but our self only matters in community for community under Jesus Christ. Our need to restore our relationships is a long goal, but a worthy one. So the question is how do we do it? How do we turn away from our desire and look to the desire of Christ. How do we turn away from our needs and look at the needs of our spouse, our children, our siblings, our neighbors, our countrymen, and our world? How do we begin to pave the way for a new generation surround by selfishness and self seeking morality? How do we become examples, and how do we begin to lay down new teaching? How do we learn to look away from the mirror, and out the window?
God has been taken out of school Home and every aspect of our lives. Our whole idea and concept of God and How he controls our lives have gone down the drain. Love is no longer a common world and has grown cold in the lives of many people. We only care about ourselves and the money we can acquire.
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