Maybe it’s because I have reached my limit. Maybe you have too.
Maybe it’s because I can still vividly remember walking in the 1978 Memorial Day Parade in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, holding an American Flag alongside my Dad and his ambulance corps and feeling so proud of my nation.
Maybe it’s because we seem to be on a downward spiral and it seems less and less likely that we can turn around.
Maybe it’s because I believe a nation has a kind of soul and our nation’s soul is wounded and ill.
Maybe it’s because I have a daughter of a similar age.
But I can’t help but be so disturbed by the thought and reality of that little girl’s body found in the garbage dump after having gone missing recently.
Kids are supposed to be alive and walking home safely in their neighborhoods. Little girls should be swinging on the swing in the back singing Taylor Swift songs and writing and illustrating books with stick figures and backward letters.
But not for Somer Thompson, whose body was, as her father described, “discarded like a piece of trash.”
I know this is not the first time it has happened…and it won’t be the last.
But it is a very startling metaphor – a young, innocent girl killed and dumped in the garbage. It screams of a people and a nation that do not value life. And we have known this for a while. It’s just a little more visible today.
How can we say that we value life when we worship nearly everything else but the Author of Life? In God We Trust?
It’s more like – In…money, violence, sports, alcohol and drugs, possessions, sex, appearances, video games and ourselves…We Trust. You don’t need to be a person of faith to see where this has brought us and where it is going to lead.
The apathy doesn’t help either. Our apathy helps us drift off slowly, painlessly as we have watched our nation’s soul and many of the things of real substance disintegrate.
After hearing a message of warning from one of God’s prophets, a people of long ago began fasting. The king of those people was also moved by the message and said, “Let everyone call urgently on God. Let them give up their evil ways, and their violence. Who knows? God may yet relent and with compassion turn from his fierce anger so that we will not perish (Jonah 3).”
And God’s response to those people? “When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he had compassion and did not bring upon them the destruction he had threatened (Jonah 3).”
What does God see when He looks upon America’s soul? What does God think of Somer Thompson’s body in a Georgia garbage dump?
Yet, God does see and respond to repentance and turning our hearts to Him. The people of Nineveh, which I mentioned above, did so, and God relented. He is after all, a God of second chances.
I know this is not a typical Living Water. I would have preferred to write something else. But I had to be obedient. As much as I love to talk about grace, it doesn’t take away from how much sin and evil still offend God.
And I am no king, but I couldn’t be silent today about how I see sin and evil corrupting our nation and how we have to turn from it – soon.
Let everyone in our nation call urgently on God and let us give up our evil ways and violence.
Who knows?
Amen.
Living Water 