I am reading a book called "The Hole in our Gospel". This is actually the second time that I am reading it, because it is so full of information. Here is a portion of the book:
When a major jetliner crashes anywhere in the world, it inevitably sets off a worldwide media frenzy covering every aspect of the tragedy. I want you to imagine for a moment that you woke up this morning to the following headline: "One Hundred Jetliners Crash, Killing 26,500." Think of the pandemonium this would create across the world as heads of state, parliaments, and congresses convened to grapple with the nature and causes of this tragedy. Think about the avalanche of media coverage that it would ignite around the globe as reporters shared the shocking news and tried to communicate its implications for the world. Air travel would no doubt grind to a halt as governments shut down the airlines and panicked air travelers canceled their trips. The National Transportation Safety Board and perhaps the FBI, CIA, and local law enforcement agencies and thier international equivalents would mobilize investigations and dedicate whatever manpower was required to understand what happened and to prevent it from happening again.
Now imagine that the very next day, one hundred more planes crashed- and one hundred more the next, and the next, and the next. It is unimaginable that something this terrible could ever happen.
But it did - and it does.
It happened today and it happened yesterday. It will happen again tomorrow. But there was no media coverage. No heads of state, parliaments. or congresses stopped what they were doing to address the crisis, and no investigations were launched. Yet more than 26, 500 children died yesterday of preventable causes related to their poverty, and it will happen again today and tomorrow and the day after that. Almost 10 million children will be dead in the course of a year. So why does the crash of a single plane dominate the front pages of newspapers across the world while the equivalent of one hundred planes filled with children crashing daily never reaches our ears? And even though we have the awareness, the access, and the ability to stop it, why have we chosen not to? Perhaps one reason is that these kids who are dying are not our kids; they're somebody else's.
If you heard on the radio that thousands of children die each year in car accidents, it would likely strike you as sad, but I doubt you would become very emotional. If instead you learned that your neighbor's child just died in a car crash, it would hit much closer to home, and your emotional response would be much deeper. You would immediately want to respond - to comfort your neighbors and to come along side them in their grief, helping in any way you could. But what if you learned that your
own child had been killed? You would be devastated at the deepest possible level. It would be a life-shattering and profoundly personal tragedy for you, one that would forever after redefine you. For some reason we are wired in such a way that we can become almost indifferent to tragedies that are far away from us emotionally, socially, or geographically, but when the same tragedy happens to us or someone close to us, everything changes.
How might God look at this issue? Does He look at the suffering of a child in Cambodia or Malawi with a certain sense of emotional distance? Does God have different levels of compassion for children based on their geographic location, their nationality, their race-or perhaps their parents' income level? Does He turn the offending page to read the sports section-or is His heart broken because each child is precious to Him? God surely grieves and weeps, because every one of these children is
HIS child-not somebody elses'.
