I just read one of our new racer’s blogs (http://robbyriggs.theworldrace.org) . Robby and his team are just outside of Lima, Peru working with victims of last year’s earthquake. The truth is: it’s hard. What started out as an innocent game with children turned into one of the most impacting experiences of Robby and his team’s lives.
Death is a curious thing. We know it’s going to happen to all of us someday but we spend an inordinate amount of time in denial or in frantic evasion of it. In some sense, it’s embarrassing, it’s unpresentable, it’s disturbing.
The truth is, it’s just like every other hard truth we try to avoid dwelling on. Last year on World Race, my team and I discussed the idea of “cognitive dissonance” which is loosely defined as the tension one feels between what is true and what is willing to be accepted. Psychologically, our instinct is to move into a place where cognitive dissonance resolves into peace.
For example, stress causes us to move into cognitive dissonance because we want to accept that our lives are flawless, peace-filled, or at least under our control. Anxiety comes when we experience truth that challenges that. Exposure to the world’s suffering acts in many a similar way. We optimistically want the world to be a place where bad things don’t happen to good people, we don’t want to accept the truth that there is sickness, evil and death in this world. Our traditional American way is to shut it out, to live in denial – to avoid educating ourselves on the harsh realities of our world.
Christ said that He had not been sent to the healthy but to the sick for it is the sick that need the doctor. As Christ-followers, we are called to the sick, the lonely, the wounded, the lost. Our lives ARE about more than our comfortable, luxurious existences we tend to build for ourselves.
The truth is, the world needs hope. In the nearly 18 countries I visited last year, not once did this fundamental truth fail me. From the educated to the simple, the rich to the poor – the world is searching for hope.
Fortunately for them, such hope exists. Now all we need to do is give it to them…it’s not actually that complicated. Nearly 75 deliverers of this hope are on the field right now doing just that through World Race. What part are we to play in this? That’s the real question.
