until when

I sat down to write a sweet blog about my daughter tonight and I may still do that but on my start up page the news story flashed across my screen: "at least 10 deaths reported," "Deadly Rampage in Alabama." The picture showed Geneva, Alabama right above the panhandle of Florida and I was a bit sickened. I went to college not super-close to Geneva. It was about 100 miles from Pensacola where I finished my undergraduate degree, but you know how things look so close on a map like that. It just had a bit more intensity to it as I read.

Again and again and again this happens. Someone comes to a place of rage where they feel that the best option is to kill others and then turn the gun on themselves. How does life get to that point and what kind of world do we live in where this happens more than once? This will be the lead story on all of the news channels across the country and we'll all hope to hear soon the killer's reasons and his plan, but in the end it will just be another in the long list of horrifying stories of people going on a killing spree. Is this world hopeless? Is there anything that we can look to that can pull our world out of this unspeakable evil? Where is God in a story like this?

I know I wrote only a few days ago on a similar issue, but here it raises its head again. These things have been happening since the beginning of time, though it seems like with our 24 hour news cycle that it happens more today. Only a few chapters into the Scriptures Cain is so infuriated that he kills his brother. There's some crazy stories about pharaohs killing all male children two and under. There is the story of some brothers who kill a whole town full of man with an elaborate plan. Herod tried to have all male children under two killed in Jesus' day. We all have heard the insane mass murders that Hitler orchestrated and more recently of Saddam Hussein and then we end up to this shooting today. Can God really be in control of a world where all of this is happening?

This world is broken, isn't it? There's no denying it. It's no more or less broken than it was the day that Adam ate of the fruit that was forbidden. People are the same as they've been for thousands of years. We are all broken creatures searching for what will make us whole. We look for love, acceptance, belonging etc. and then when we don't find it we decide that we'll just have to keep looking our whole life and that's the point of life - the looking, we lose hope and settle that there just is no hope, we lose hope and decide to take ours and/or others hope, or we realize that the hope for this world lies only in one place.

I believe that Jesus came to fix the brokenness of this world. I believe that Jesus came to be the hope of the world. I believe that Jesus will take our brokenness if we will give it completely over to him and like a master artist, put it together in the most beautiful masterpiece that we could ever imagine. This giving of our lives is so hard because we want to keep control of it just in case God would back out on his end of a bargain like others we've met and we want to be able to fall back into our comfort zone and blame him if it falls through. It's our insane desire to hold onto the brokenness that continues to hold back what God is doing in our world. But it isn't as though the world as it is doesn't do something good. The fractures, though, also serve to stand in contrast with the amazing glory and perfection of our God. This evil helps to serve the purpose of showing us how badly we need to be put together and how futile our attempts at it really are.

This giving of our brokenness to God is a difficult process. I know that I have told God that he can have my shattered life, but for some reason I continue to hold onto the bits and pieces of it that are somehow a comfort amidst a world that looks a whole lot more like my slivers than the piece of art that God is patiently working on. I truly believe that if we would give up every little portion of our scrambled lives that we would begin to see God's kingdom moving in ways that would not only put our own lives back together but would lift a hurting world toward His healing. What am I holding onto that is holding back God's work in the world around me? What are you holding onto?