Turning Our Eyes

Have you seen the sheer madness and pain going on in Iraq recently, the ISIS crisis? Did you know months before there were hundreds of Christian girls abducted and given as child brides to Muslim terrorists or sold into trafficking? If you would rather not be bothered with these tragedies that don't seem to effect your world then you have buried your head in the sand. If you call yourself a Christian you are a part of this persecuted Body of Christ suffering on the other side of the world. You might as well bury the rest of yourself in that sand too if that is your attitude. Be fully your own interpretation of "in this world but not of it." 

Jesus--the wounded Healer. What did He suffer for our sake? It's beyond what we can even imagine and He did it willingly for the joy set before Him; for us. We cannot bear to think of it, to know His kind of suffering. So we make Easter about bunnies and chocolate to sweeten the blow. Chocolate crosses with pretty flowers. He was tortured for us and we look away, make it swallowable, or at the very least easier to look at. The cleaned-up Savior barely bruised in the oil paintings we admire.

Our eyes dare not take in the truest suffering of our Lord so we can readily dismiss the suffering around the world. Because if Jesus--The Lord of all Heaven and Earth--truly suffered that means our western theologies which support a prosperous and easy life might not be valid.

And it's so contradictory that we willing watch the violence of a TV series or a movie. We feed on fake violence because we know it's not real. But the hurting, reeling world is too much to bear. Perhaps it's a little too gruesome and hard to stomach. Perhaps it will threaten to pop our happy bubble. Or maybe we don't know what to do, how to process it all--this problem of evil. So we hide our gaze, we turn our eyes, we ignore the suffering. Chosen ignorance: the mental pain killer, the tranquilizer of our conscience which side effects are the numbing of conviction, the death of compassion. We choose to live a dead faith in place of the Gospel. We ignore The Christ, our wounded Healer; the least of these. When we fail to acknowledge our hurting world, our suffering brothers and sisters, we dismiss our Savior. 

Like the old hymn goes, the solution is to "Turn your eyes upon Jesus..." 

What are you afraid of? What is keeping you from becoming alive to the hurting world? Are you too overwhelmed? Pray. Are you broken over the pain that you see? Pray. Is your heart hardened to anyone or anything outside your own life? Pray. Are you too distracted, too busy to get involved, too tired to take on any more worrisome news? Stop, and pray. You see, every one of our excuses is met with a discipline that brings us into the very throne room of Heaven. In His presence, the presence of the wounded Healer, we are able to know what our part is in the face of suffering. To ignore and to willingly turn away from our brothers and sisters in need is to turn away from God. Those who suffer share with Christ in His suffering. If we are to serve our Lord, we must serve those whom He is close to: the brokenhearted. 

Don't hide your head in the sand any longer! Wake up! Look to Jesus who suffered for you. Open your eyes to the hurting world. Pray, listen and move.~*