Dear Family,
You don’t need me to tell you that our world is becoming increasingly divisive. It can be hard to imagine what is going on in the minds of the people around us on every side of every issue. I know I have been questioning the sanity of our society for quite some time.
But can we imagine for a second, the pain and struggle that has caused other humans to attack themselves and each other? What causes a person to shoot people at a concert and at a church service?
Hurt people hurt people. The problems and issues we are dealing with today are not because of the person in front of us, it’s because of the person before that person, before that person, before that person, etc.
Have you ever played the game ‘telephone’, where one person on one end has a message that he whispers to the person next to him or her, and then they whisper the message to the person next to them and so on? Most of the time at the end of the telephone line the message has changed. This is not because the last person decided that they wanted to lie, rather because at one point in the line someone said one wrong word and then the next person said one wrong word, and then the next person misheard another word and all of a sudden the original message is gone.
That’s the same way with life. At one time my great-great-great grandfather was hurt by his grandfather, and then he tried as best he could to not hurt his son in the same way but neglected him in another way, and because he is hurt by his dad he inadvertently hurts his daughter who starts to wonder if maybe drugs, sex, or violence might help heal her pain and on and on and on.
There are deep-rooted wounds in the heart of every part of and every person in our society.
Much of our individual pain and overall cultural suffering can be traced back to adolescence.
But we don’t have to stay in this pain. We can step into the lives of children and teens around us and change the bitterness of their pain into a hope for the consummation of the Kingdom of God.
That’s what Britt and I are doing. We’re joining Youth For Christ to step into the pain of
students who don’t know Christ to show them that true hope and healing come from God. Our goal is to introduce students to Christ and bring them into the church body through our work at Life In Christ Church.
What are you going to do to join the hope and healing of our world?
You could volunteer at your local youth church, Youth For Christ, or some other youth
organization. You could donate money to Youth For Christ for Britt and I or to any other Youth For Christ chapter to help them reach more students with the hope of Christ. There are countless avenues available to serve in. The question is will you actually do it?
God has given us the gift of His love, and it is up to us to share His transforming love to our dying society.
“All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” – 2nd Corinthians 5:18-21
REDEEM THE TIME 