One of the drawbacks of trying to keep abreast of current events is that one can very quickly become discouraged by the state of the world. One has to go in with a couple of tools at their disposal to avoid this fate, not the least of which is acknowledging the old press saying about “If it bleeds, it leads.” Media tends to exaggerate, making things appear worse than they truly are. Hype and hyperbole are the order of the day.
But some things you just can’t mitigate or avoid. I was disheartened greatly by two recent deaths. The first was Lenny Robinson, a wealthy Marylander who used his wealth to purchase a Lamborghini and a Batman costume and went around to hospitals to entertain sick children as the superhero. The second was Kyle Jean Baptiste, the first African-American to land the lead role in my favorite musical Les Miserables. Good people, trendsetters and role models, taken too soon. No hype. No exaggeration here. Just two senseless deaths.
Life is hard and the older we all get the more it seem to become so. Easy to believe that everything is just going to hell, that it’s all getting worse and the best and most noble of us are going to fall prey to corruption, cynicism, or death. Good and innocent people are being murdered or dying of disease and accident unexpectedly. Our slate of candidates for the Presidency seems determined to outdo one another in how nasty, bigoted, and cruel they can be. Given the number of indictments and investigations surrounding several of them, it seems clear many are rather ethnically-challenged. Hardly the statesmen we once knew that ran for that office. There are protests in the streets, a world refugee crisis (to which our own immigrant issues are, in fact, related), and imminent threat of global warning. No wonder people are discouraged and frightened by the world today.
But human beings being what they are, I suspect that none of this is really new. Previous generations faced the threat of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War, the threat of fascism during WWII, tyrant kings in the 18th century, and the Black Death in the 14th century to name just a few. Life has never been easy. There was never a golden age in the past that we lost somewhere. Things have always been this way.
When the prophecies of Isaiah were being recorded, it did not happen in some idyllic world that we’ve long forgotten. Things were pretty rotten then too. And yet, the word of God that came to the prophet was a word of hope. Here is what the world will become once the kingdom of God comes in its fullness. There will be justice and peace. The blind will see. The deaf will hear. No longer will villainy and folly be rewarded.
This word is no less powerful today than it was thousands of years ago. Despite the ugliness we see around us, the cycle of time is moving us toward that idyllic future. The kingdom is coming. For all the nightmares of our world, God is still in charge and his plan is still operative. The future that He envisions is coming. A world of hope is on its way.
So I try to remember that in the midst of rough times in a rough world. As Martin Luther King once famously said, the “arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” The Peaceable Kingdom is coming. Trust in that.
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