“This world is ruled by violence, but that’s better left unsaid.” Bob Dylan

“Often I am ill-prepared for action in a dark world of injustice because I have gotten used to a little lie within my mind. I have gotten used to the idea that the fair garden that I have worked so hard to carve out myself and my family is normal. I have gradually adjusted to the idea that ‘the world’ into which Christ has sent his disciples is actually a reasonably pleasant backyard patio. [but]… The outcome in the twentieth century would be described [otherwise] …I would just call it an open-mouthed grave: an entire generation of European youth composting the World War I battlefields of Verdun and the Somme, Hitler’s six million Jews, Stalin’s twenty million Soviet citizens, Mao’s tens of millions of political enemies and peasant famine victims, Pol Pot’s two million Cambodians, the Interhamwe’s million Tutsi Rwandans, and the millions of lives wasted away during apartheid’s forty-year reign. We can easily forget that the same spirit of darkness rules our present age. …Outside the affluent West … in the Two-Thirds World where most of the children God created actually live, the Fall is being played out in ways more familiar to the biblical writers: it is manifest in a world of brutal injustice. …All those Scriptures about ‘the world,’ which seemed rather melodramatic when I heard them in my suburban church as a kid, turned out to be much more worthy of my attention than I ever knew.” Gary Haugen

‘Their feet are swift to shed blood, ruin and misery mark their ways…’ Romans 3:15

Moving From the Head to the Heart

• Does your comfortable lifestyle blind you to gross injustice in “the Two-Thirds World where most of the children God created actually live?”
• We don’t talk about “the world” or “worldliness” much any more – and when we did it was about women wearing short skirts or men who smoked. Imagine how much bigger, darker and more important the concept is.

Abba, when I obtain a service without paying a bribe, when I’m stopped by police without being beaten or unfairly imprisoned, when the legal system works for me, when my daughter walks home from school without being kidnapped to be made a prostitute in a faraway city or work in a sweat shop – may I remember the multitudes around the world who lives are not like mine.

For More: Good News About Injustice by Gary Haugen