Our pastor at Honey Lake Church, (Kenny Munds), sent out an urgent request to help a family in our community yesterday. The mother has a 14 year old son who suffers from a rare disease and has to get around by using a walker. He’s had several brain operations and needs both hips replaced. Now the mother and her 7 year old daughter have both been diagnosed with the same disease.
Besides caring for her son and two daughters (4 and 7), this mom has to care for her own mother as well. She is working part-time at a restaurant, but it hardly pays the rent. Our church delivered food to this family at Thanksgiving and a local hospice service is reaching out to some local churches and trying to find them some help for Christmas.
I got to thinking about this and looked up some pork recently included in the congressional budget.
$98,257 for a shuttle from a congressman’s hometown to D.C.
$190,000 to digitize photos at the ritzy New York Historical Society
$200,000 for a tattoo removal program in California
$300,000 to preserve the ‘final resting place for Hawaiian royalty’
$500,000 to maintain a WW1 statue… in France!
$1.3 million to a museum dedicated to Pacific Northwest naval heritage
$1.9 million for water taxi service at Pleasure Beach, CT
$15 million gift for Ireland
I got nauseated while researching this and only included as many as I could stand, but rest assured this is merely a small sample of what’s included. It’s a shame that the lobbyists who pushed this through in the dark of the hour in smoke filled rooms in exchange for money and votes don’t represent this poor family and the many others in such dire straits, but that is the current state of our fallen world.
So a desperate poor community comes to a small country church like ours and solicits help from our 50 some odd regular attendees. To be sure we will respond as best we can, but with our small group of believers I can assure you it will be insufficient for even this one family’s needs, much less the many others in our community who suffer.
I know what some of you are thinking: “If God is good, then why does evil and injustice exist?” If He is all powerful and could remove all evil from the world, but refuses to do so then He Himself must be an evil God because He doesn’t seem to be doing anything about it.
Even the writers of the Bible complained about pain and evil in this world. “Evils have encompassed me without number” (Psalm 40:12). “Why is my pain unceasing, my wound incurable, refusing to be healed?” (Jeremiah 15:18). “The whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now” (Romans 8:22).
The Scriptures make it clear that God did not create the world in the state in which it is now, but evil came as a result of selfishness and sin. The Bible says that God is a God of love and He desired to create a utopia for mankind to enjoy. He demonstrated that love and hoped that we would love Him in similar fashion. But genuine love cannot exist absent free choice and thus man was given the choice to accept God’s love or to reject it. Man brought evil upon himself by selfishly choosing his own way apart from God’s way.
Let me be clear, our own choice spawned evil. God is neither evil nor did
He create evil.
Because of the Fall, the world is now abnormal. We have been separated from God. As a result our world can be harsh and unrelenting in meting out pain and suffering.
The bright light of hope is that although evil is here and it is real, it is also temporary. Evil will eventually be destroyed. This is the hope that every believer enjoys, because it is assured by Christ crucified and resurrected.
In this fallen world we as followers of Christ are to emulate Him. Anyone who has read the Bible knows that Jesus had great compassion for the poor and downtrodden and never met anyone that He didn’t help.
How can you know that you are a child of God? You will have great compassion for those around you and will do your utmost to demonstrate it with action.
Matt.25:34
“Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’
“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’
“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’
December 18, 2014 – Click here to listen