“I’m glad this isn’t happening to me.”

Mustard Seeds

by Paul Kowalewski

Recently I had a conversation with someone who expressed her deep frustration at being unable to “do anything” about all the brokenness going on in the world today.

She reads stories about the immigrant crisis in America; she gazes at those images of bodies and debris from a “shot-down” plane scattered across a field in the Ukraine; she hears reports about Israeli teenagers murdered and Palestinian children bombed on a beach; she steps over homeless people sleeping on the sidewalk when she goes to work, and she laments that there is nothing she can do about any of it.

In some sense, there is a kernel of truth in my friend’s frustration. After all, no one of us can “fix” the looming immigration or homeless problems, stop the war in the Ukraine, or resolve the “long-held” animosities between Palestinians and Israelis; and even if we did do something like help an immigrant family or attend a peace rally, we feel that would really be only an insignificant “drop in a bucket.”

So most people just shake their heads at all the chaos and the mess, perhaps feeling sorry for those who suffer, and maybe secretly thinking, “I’m glad this isn’t happening to me.”

While no one of us can fix all of these problems or stop all the suffering, I actually think there is something each and every human being can do in response to all the brokenness in the world today. We don’t need to just sit back and watch it all.

Jesus taught his disciples:

The Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed that someone sowed in the field;

it is the smallest of seeds,

but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree.

READ MORE

organictalks.com