MOMENTS LIKE THESE punctuate life. A young woman confronts a young man--both are cousins of similar age. It occurs in the driveway of the young man’s house. He’s sporting cuts and bruises from the most recent drunken brawl he’s been involved in. She’s a law student. Their lives until now have sharply diverged. Now they’re about to converge, and like the arcing of two great oppositely-charged poles of electrical current, they’re on a collision course.
She is furious. She fumes because she cares so much and is torn. She states the facts emphatically in a last ditch effort to cause some consternation to furrow his brow. She fears the damage he might cause. She fears losing him, and that ‘knock at the door.’
He’s not with it, clearly, both in the moment and about life itself. He just doesn’t seem to get it. He exists to party and drink and drug (as if there were no other purpose to life) and then inextricably finds himself in a world of trouble the next day--it’s his routine. A routine destined in pain.
She’s almost the only family he has; at least she’s the only one who seems to care. And she knows only full well that this is the case. The burden weighs heavily on her shoulders. Grounded so much is she, it’s a lesson he needs but probably won’t heed. Drunks almost never really do, at least that is until they’re swept up half in death itself--even then it’s too late for some.
This scene is characteristic of that which occurs with monotonous regularity in life. One person who’s lost their way in life getting the talking to by another person who can’t help seeing and noting the truth. Yet, the person who observes the reality is helpless to do anything about it. Tragically, the decision for change rests with the one least equipped to make it.
It’s a wake-up call from the ages. It’s an interruption to the prevailing routine; the light of reality beaconing into the darkness. It’ll need all the intensity it can get.
And this will never change this side of heaven. The broken twisted world will never reconcile these moral delinquents; the broken world with its broken parents and broken people in positions of authority, not to mention the inescapable broken market economy, and other such things, will continue to reinforce it.
The point is we must accept all the bad with the good, and keep trying and praying in any event. That ‘lost’ person in our midsts has a chance if they think they have a chance, and we must try to create this in them through the power of God.
God is in the serious business of miracles. But, even God cannot sway the will of some. If only these people could understand and accept that we must lose our lives to save them.
Seemingly more than anyone, this person needs Jesus, as he said, “For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it.” (Matthew 16:25) So many go the former way--the way of the world--and this is the way of living Gehenna[1] in comparison to the latter.
Sometimes we do get to see and experience firsthand the miracles God orchestrates in the lives of the ‘especially broken’... sometimes.
Finding Jesus means finding life, though we must give it up i.e. what we think it is, before we can gain it. We may often find we’ve lived half a lifetime without much of a clue. And then for the very first time we live by Faith.
It’s not too late to call on the name of the Lord, your very personal God. Going to talk to someone who might lead us in that right direction could be the first step.
Copyright © 2009, S. J. Wickham. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.
[1] “Gehenna” means a place or state of misery (Merriam-Webster).
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