The Deception of Despair

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The atrocities currently taking place in Gaza have affected me deeply.  The death of innocent children and the apathy from so many people regarding those deaths have been beyond discouraging.  I found myself nearly slipping into depression and despair, wishing for an eject button to get me off of this planet.  I do not want to live in a world where 1,500 pound bombs are dropped on innocent children in their own homes while the international community fiddles as to what to do about it or barely takes notice at all.

But despair is a deception.  Evil knows that it has already lost and its days are numbered.  Despair is a last ditch attempt to delay the inevitable.  What is the inevitable?  The end of injustice, the end off oppression, the end of violence, the end of unnecessary suffering.  When good people are silent evil wins.  And when good people become overwhelmed with all that is wrong with the world and fall into despair, evil prolongs its last days.  Do not be deceived.  The darkness cannot overcome the light.  Despair is a smoke screen, nothing more than evidence that evil is in its final death throes.  It is designed to keep us from seeing our power and fool us into believing that we cannot overturn every system of oppression.  Do not be deceived.  We can and we must.

Evil will never win because no amount of violence and oppression can ever extinguish the thirst and hunger for righteousness.  The thirst and hunger for righteousness, the desire for a world free of violence, poverty, oppression and hate, the capacity to imagine a whole new world that is just, is eternal.  It cannot be killed.  It cannot be exterminated.  It can only be satisfied and it will not rest until it has had its fill.    

Evil has already lost and because we know this we will fight it wherever it dares to show its face.  We do not give in to fear, apathy or helplessness.  We confront it head on.  I believe that authentic Christianity requires radical militancy regarding injustice, an uncompromising, unyielding, unstoppable determination to end injustice wherever we find it. 

We are seeing injustice now in Gaza where innocent civilians are being regularly targeted by Israel.  Stripping the Palestinians of their homeland and civil rights, locking them into ghettos and blocking them from resources and access to power and self determination apparently is not enough.  Now innocent Palestinian men, women and children must be bombed.

But let us not give in to despair and the paralysis it brings.  Let us not turn our heads and look the other way in apathy.  Now is the time to take our faith, hope and love and translate it into action.  We must stand up to injustice wherever it appears.  We must love the oppressed enough to risk our very lives for their liberation or cease to call ourselves the people of God.  “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” (Martin Luther King Jr.).  It is time for all of us who consider ourselves  be the people of God to join the struggle for the liberation of the oppressed.  If not now then when?

Following The Way,

Kevin