reading

Okay, so I'm caught in this weird place with God right now. I suppose you could say that I grew up in a bit of a "bubble", not really noticing or caring about what was going on with people in my own town or anywhere else in the world. I was really into ME! This was true pretty much all the time until God started changing it when we moved to the Metroplex about 7 1/2 years ago. Slowly, after going to many World Mandate conferences and after being a part of Christ Fellowship, God has begun to open my eyes to people and life and pain and suffering. I read this book called Sold last week and it shook me up. It's a young adult lit book (fiction) about the sex slave trade in India. It was SO sad. At one point I just put it down and wept, asking God to have mercy! The main character is a 12 year old girl and the book is written in the form of short journal-type entries. The author wrote the book after interviewing several girls/women who had been rescued from the slave trade, so it gives a pretty accurate picture of what they go through (I wouldn't recommend this book to any unmarried teenager, by the way). Then Randy and I watched Hotel Rwanda before we went to bed last p.m. (Somehow we missed renting the romantic Valentine's Day flick! ha!). I was overwhelmed. I'm embarrassed to confess that I didn't even really know what had happened with that whole deal until last p.m. and it was only about 15 years ago. One of the most piercing lines in the whole movie occurred when an American reporter had captured footage of some massacres. The Rwandan hotel manager said that surely when he showed this video in America and Europe that someone would come and help. The American replied that unfortunately he thought that they would say how sad it was and go back to eating their dinner. Ugh! Is that not SO true? Injustice. All I have found myself thinking about is the indescribable UNFAIRNESS of it all. Almost ONE MILLION people killed in Rwanda and the world just watched (after making sure that we got all the rich white Europeans and Americans out safely, of course). I'm finding myself wondering what in the world God's heart does when He sees all of this. My husband informed me that similar things are happening right now in Sudan. He is currently reading a book about the Lord's Resistance Army, etc in Uganda called First Kill Your Family. The Mighty Men Ugandan trip this summer is the reason for all this reading. BUT...I had a conversation with a close friend this week and she reminded me that we have to be consumed with Christ, staring at HIM, worshipping HIM, if we're going to get any kind of right perspective on the injustice that's happening all around us. SO! I'm only humbly left with my smallness and the incomprehensible HUGENESS of a sovereign King who has held all the past, present, and future pain of a very broken world in His own heart. Then He rose from the dead. There is hope - and it is only found in Him. I love Him now more than I ever have.