One Hundred Jetliners Crash, Killing 26,500
Image by Janis Krums
What if we woke up this morning to this headline?
One horrific accident can claim the top spot on the news for a time. A mass tragedy of this magnitude would surely garner the attention of the world. What if we woke up the next day and the same thing happened again? And the next day… and the next…
Richard Stearns lays out this “what if” in his book, The Hole in the Gospel:
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 airlines and panicked air travelers canceled their trips. The National Transportation Safety Board and perhaps the FBI, CIA, and local law enforcement agencies and their international equivalents would mobilize investigations and dedicate whatever manpower was required to understand what happened and to prevent it from happening again ...
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.
Stearns attributes our inaction to what he calls Compassion Fatigue - the state of being deluged with information and news from all over the world to the point that we have less empathy for people.
What will it take for us to begin to see and care about those around us?
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"Thin Places" are rich in Celtic tradition. They are the places in our lives where the divine and the natural worlds come so close together that we can catch a glimpse of God. For the Celtics these places were very real - places within creation where we could physically go. The Thin Places in our own lives are those moments where the space between us & the Kingdom is thin, when we are introduced to a greater glimpse of Who He is through our experiences and through the stories of others.
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