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When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible but in the end, they always fall - think of it, ALWAYS ~ Mahatma Gandhi
Psalm 121
I lift up my eyes to the mountains-
where does my help come from?
2 My help comes from the LORD,
the Maker of heaven and earth.
3 He will not let your foot slip-
he who watches over you will not slumber;
4 indeed, he who watches over Israel
will neither slumber nor sleep.
Every era of history has brought those calamitous moments when even the faithful wonder if things are falling apart. Our time is no different. Whether it's the ever expanding violence or the global economic woes or the growing gap between rich and poor or the plight of the fleeing or the evident moral chaos, we live in a time when one could easily give up hope; or at the very least wonder why God seems so absent.
After the killings on the campus of Virginia Tech University on April 16, 2007 where 32 were gunned down and 25 wounded by Seung-Hui Cho, who then committed suicide, the noted Christian thinker Philip Yancey preached a sermon there titled Where Is God When It Hurts? Let me share some portions of that meaningful message.
I would like to promise you a long, pain-free life, but I cannot. God has not promised us that. Rather, the Christian view of the world reduces everything to this formula: The world is good. The world has fallen. The world will be redeemed...You know that the world is good. Look around you at the blaze of spring in the hills of Virginia. Look around you at the friends you love. Though overwhelmed with grief right now, you will learn to laugh again, to play again, to climb up mountains and kayak down rivers again, to love, to rear children. The world is good. You know, too, that the world has fallen. Here at Virginia Tech, you know that as acutely as anyone on this planet. I ask you also to trust that the world, your world, will be redeemed. This is not the world God wants or is satisfied with. God has promised a time when evil will be defeated, when events like the shootings at Nickel Mines and Columbine and Virginia Tech will come to an end. More, God has promised that even the scars we accumulate on this fallen planet will be redeemed, as Jesus demonstrated to Thomas.
Trust a God who can redeem what now seems unredeemable...Honor the grief you feel. The pain is a way of honoring those who died, your friends and classmates and professors. It represents life and love. The pain will fade over time, but it will never fully disappear. Where is God when it hurts? Where God's people are. Where misery is, there is the Messiah, and on this earth, the Messiah takes form in the shape of his church. That's what the body of Christ means.
Finally, cling to the hope that nothing that happens, not even this terrible tragedy, is irredeemable. We serve a God who has vowed to make all things new. You know well the poignancy of grief. As healing progresses, may you know, too, that joy, a foretaste of the world redeemed.
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