Saturday Sharing: Depraved Indifference

links, message, Saturday Sharing

12/04/10

A friend of mine shared this on facebook, and it really hit home. I think as a culture [especially with all the media that is involved in our life] we have become so bombarded with messages, and stories that we have become immune to them. As Gregory Spencer puts it in his book, “Awakening the Quieter Virtues”, we’ve become “viewers who brag they can watch anything and not be adversely influenced.” But we have been influenced, and in a very detrimental way. We think there might be consequences to watching sex and drugs on the internet, but hey, we’ll learn to not let it affect us. So instead we’ve learned to not care about other’s stories.

Everyday we watch the news on TV, we read the newspaper, we watch horror films, we read forwards, and we’ve slowly learned to just “not worry about it”. We as Christians haven’t even *begun* to break through that indifference. We’ve become self-focused, thinking that *someone* else will take care of the poor, the needy, the starving, the unsaved. We ignore the stories of others, because we’ve heard and seen them all a million times, and have *chosen* again and again to pass them by, like the men in the story of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10.

Spencer shared a story about a Belize that chose not to watch the news, because, he said that he “didn’t have time to grieve”. We in America think that choosing to do that is “burying your head in the sand”, but yet, if we have no intention of doing anything about the stories that we see and hear, what is the purpose of watching them?

Yes, not everyone is called to the orphans in Liberia, but I’d like to encourage you to allow this to move you so much that you seek the Lord to hear where He wants you. Let things break your heart, because that’s what He’s feeling.

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