WWII Photo...

i forget what city this overlooks, but what a contrast. Check out the devastation in the first photo. It was taken after the bombing of the German city shown. WWII....what an incredible aweful, enlightening historical event. Just think - in only happened 60 years ago! Do you think that modernity, or modernization of our world civilization, keeps us from violence? Think about 9/11. Think about the fact that the Rowanda genocide occured in the 90's. And consider this stat: First of all, think of the # of people killed on 9/11. Times that by 2.5. That is how many people died in Rowanda. Daily. For 100 days straight. Killed primarily by macheties and automatic weapons. THAT is almost unbelievable. Over 800,000 Tutsis died at a rate that was three times faster than Hitler was at "exterminating" the Jewish people of Europe.

Think about that fact that whatever enabled Hitler and the Natzis to do what they did, and whatever enables so many people to follow him "blindly," and whatever implused the Japanese to slaughter 300,000 Chinese in just a few weeks in "the Raping of Nanking," and whatever part of 'humanness' allowed for the occurance of the Cambodian killing fields, the Chinese "Cultural Revolution," the Soviet Gulag, the current oppression (genocide?) in Sudan, the Abu Ghraib prisioni treatment, the Parisian riots, and thousands of other cases of hatred, oppression, violence, etc...whatever allowed for all of that to happen....is in us.

To quote Os Guiness in his book Unspeakable (where I've pulled most of these stats), "What does it say of us as human beings that the people who do these things are hte same species as we are?" What does it say to us, that whatever evil flowed from people's calloused, numbed hearts in these instances of violence and oppression is also able to flow from my and your heart. We are human, just as any other human. And just as capable of hatred, rape, murder, vengeance, and blinded embittered ruthlessness towards fellow humans. Francis Schaeffer taught that humans are a strange mix of a great nobleness and tragic depravity. What we need is a path toward stopping, reducing, irradicating this evil that lives inside of us. And I do not believe that any government-subsidized program, any education system, or any propoganda of self-help will do it. We are left quite helpless without some help from without. And yet, the Jewish and Christian Scriptures teach that all of reality was created by a personal God who is love and justice and holiness, that all of reality has become corrupt due to us having 'rebelled' (notice the language of relationship) against our creator, and that God has entered the very broken reality that he originally created to be light and truth and lead us back to our Father, help us be changed from the inside out by his Spirit, and lead us towards real life.

What a great story found in the Scriptures. If it is true, what great hope we have! And if it is not believed by the world, what an ultimately hopeless reality it will continue to live and experience. So we are called to walk as pilgrims, as lights of truth and love, in a world without hope and with much dispair and evil.