Truth time: when I got out my notebook yesterday with plans to write a Launch-themed blog based on my past month’s journal entries, I had no idea I would look down on my notes with so much contempt.
The I’s seemed to jump out like visual daggers, pricking me with their pride. I, I, I.
I said. I felt. I think. I want.
And then this afternoon, as I stood in the back of the Majestic Ballroom at the Holiday Inn Atlanta where all Racers are currently being taught and coached prior to our Wednesday departure, the speaker asked us a question.
“How many of you have seen the photo of the Syrian refugee boy who washed up on the beach?”
Hands all over the room shot up. The speaker then went on to tell us that any squad traveling to Europe may have an opportunity to interact with the refugees currently flooding Europe’s shores, desperately searching for relief – and my heart lit on fire.
For those of you unaware of the current Syrian refugee crisis, the point of this blog is not to educate you. Do that for yourselves. The point of this blog is a heartcry to try and get you to identify exactly what it is that breaks your heart – and then ask you to do something about it.
Our culture is so simultaneously accustomed and apathetic to violence that we no longer pay attention to it, until the news tells us to.
Can you imagine what it must have looked like just a few weeks ago, on the morning that a family of refugees climbed into their community boat? The husband helping his trembling wife aboard, gently but quickly handing her their small children, one at a time, while the woman whispered through tears, “I can’t swim! What do we do if the boat overturns? We can’t swim!”
A few days later, the sun rises over the light brown sand of a Turkish resort beach, the tide washing a foreign object up onto the shore as the waves slide calmly back into the sea. A baby boy, only three years old, is discovered lying face-down in the wet sand, dead from drowning.
Suddenly, the world took notice.
Why? Why did it take so long?
Right now, there is a woman in Thailand who is sitting in a dank, poorly lit room, the mattress she crouches on ripping and covered only by a filthy sheet. The single lightbulb dangling in the middle of the room casts harsh light onto her matted hair and tear-streaked face, and she pulls her tattered shirt down a little farther over the dark bruises that are spreading over her hips and thighs as the sixth man to buy her today walks into the light.
In Russia, there’s a little girl with hollow brown eyes sitting on the steps outside of her orphanage, unnoticed by passers-by. When she was six years old, her mother left her in a doorway at the intersection of a busy street, told her to “wait there” for her, but never came back.
Right now, in the United States, there’s a lady celebrating her 40th birthday. She jokes how “the only thing more awful than turning forty will be turning fifty!” Meanwhile, in South Africa, a girl half her age is dying from an STD that was given to her through violent sexual assault – the same kind of assault reported by 60% of Lesotho women. She is sharply aware that she’ll be lucky to see herself reach age 30.
These things are happening right now. People are dying right now with you and I watch from the air conditioned sanctuary of our houses. Children are being abandoned. Women are being bought and sold. Families are being forced to flee the only homes they’ve ever known.
You and I will never have to worry about any of these things happening to us. But if you and I don’t do something for the people currently suffering, families and women and children will continue to die.
We are the generation paying money to adopt pedigree animals and start wars on Facebook over a lion’s death, while thousands of strays die in shelters each year.
We have zero problems dropping $5 on a latte, but turn away when we see advertisements and campaigns asking for help feeding our 45 million fellow Americans living below the poverty line.
We can no longer afford to be apathetic. We have to expand the vision for our lives to include helping the people who are suffering.
What the World Race is doing is important. The journey that God has called me on with the World Race is important.
The plans that God has for YOU are so incredibly important. Don’t ignore the injustice you feel when you hear and see these kinds of horrors – because if all you do is feel badly, nothing is going to change.
If you don’t have any idea what you are supposed to be doing to hold your hands to the wounds of this broken world, please, say a prayer so that you can find out. There is so much pain, but there is also so much beauty, and we hold the light of Jesus Christ inside of us that will drive back darkness in the most hopeless places on planet Earth.
What will you do to set the prisoners free?
