Damaged but Not Condemned God longs to repair the world through our prayers by Kurt Willems
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few years ago, while driving to a speaking engagement in Los Angeles, I flinched as an airborne object hit my windshield. Ding! The projectile smacked the bottom right-hand side of my windshield, leaving a small crack. But over the course of several weeks, the crack crept west until an arc-shaped horizontal line had traveled its entire width. I was frustrated—but also cheap. I decided to leave it alone. After all, the fracture no longer had room to grow. Enter three years later—same crack, same window. Yet something had changed over time—something in me. The crack had become an accepted—in other words, acceptable—part of my view. Deep down I knew the crack distorted what should have been a perfectly clear view. But by ignoring it, by looking past the crack rather than repairing it, I had absorbed it into what I considered to be normal. Like my windshield, our world is full of cracks and imperfections. The easy thing is to ignore these problems, accepting them as normal. But when we do, a subtle apathy creeps in. Instead of acting like people empowered by God to repair the brokenness, we take the path of least resistance and simply ignore it. The cracks are obvious—and ubiquitous—as we take in the morning newscast. A child is kidnapped. A government declares war. A plane crashes. A famine threatens the lives of millions. And all this before our first cup of coffee. By the time we walk out the door for work, we’re already overloaded with the many troubles of our world. And global bad news is quickly eclipsed by stressors that hit much closer to home. We pass a homeless person at a streetlight and speculate on how he ended up there. We wonder how secure our job really is. We think about the size of our daughter’s college tuition. We worry about a family member caught in addiction.
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By the time we arrive at our destination, we are paralyzed by personal stress and/or empathy overload. With our own small corner of the world containing more brokenness than we possess strength to engage, our default mode becomes a posture of ignorance when it comes to larger justice issues. We look past the cracks of injustice, violence, and poverty, normalizing the world’s pain while the backrooms of our minds and hearts slowly fill with guilt, shame, and anger. The Scriptures remind us that the world we live in does not match God’s intention. The Bible does not Photoshop reality but wrestles honestly with the sticky situations in which the biblical authors find themselves, situations that have a lot in common with our 21st-century lives. In Ephesians 6:10-18, Paul invites the church to “be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power” and to “put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes.” While some who grew up in the evangelical subculture may dismiss this passage as an extreme portrayal of a spirit world where demons lurk behind every bush, others see it as valid but primarily relevant to issues of personal temptation. Outfitting ourselves with truth, righteousness, and faith does indeed equip Christ-followers to find victory over any attack from the “powers of this dark world,” and this “spiritual warfare” approach has emboldened my own prayer life over the years, allowing me by God’s grace to live with integrity. But I suspect that I am not alone in having long neglected an understanding of this approach that reaches beyond personal values to broader prayers for justice in the world. Offense or defense? As a 12-year-old, I played city league basketball. The score was close during the final game of the season, and the other team tied in the