Friday, January 6, 2012

Dark Night: What An Incredible Time to Be Alive

Helena, Montana's night opens up from my doorstep. Inside the door, the girls have gone to bed and the house is quiet. Outside, the sky is dark. Stars glitter and the moon beams through scattered clouds. An airplane passes overhead. Church bells ring through the chill air.

The porch looks out over Last Chance Gulch, the heart of the miner's camp that grew into a state capitol.  A fire tower stands on the other side of the gulch, a relic of fires that marred the town's early days. Cars pass beneath it. Lovers coming home from a date. Wild ones heading out to the bars.

I see the homes of the rich and government-subsidized housing. There is police station and county jail , along with a library, my daughter's preschool, and a number of businesses and  and a state office building. To the south, the buildings give way to the mountains and pines of the Helena National Forest.

There are grander views in this state, in this town, and even on my block; but this view captures me every time. From this porch, I see the past giving way to the future. Good tugging against evil. Nature pushing back against civilization. Knowledge overcoming ignorance. It's impossible not to get lost in the grandeur of all that humanity.

The Catholic martyr Oscar Romero said, "God and human beings make history." What incredible glory and responsibility lie in those simple words. Each human being acts as a water molecule in the divine river of history. Each sacred. Each essential. Each a part of something greater. Each called to use our God-given abilities to serve our fellow human beings (1 Peter 4:10 "As each one has received a gift, use it to serve one another as good stewards of God's varied grace.")

We've been chosen to participate in a pretty incredible part of history. According to the United Nations, there are over 7 billion people living on the planet today. There were only 4 billion in the mid-1970's when I was born. Those 7 billion people are connected in ways that could not have been imagined even fifteen years ago.

From a numbers perspective, we get to play the game of history while there are more chips on the table than there ever has been before. The stakes are higher. We are going to face resource constraints and health issues of epic proportions. More people will say "I'm hungry" and "I'm sick" over the course of the next few decade than ever have combined during the span human existence. To top that off, we are living in a world full of weapons that could kill us all several times over. The challenges are real and terrifying.

Yet, each of those crises will present an incredible opportunity for us to serve each other and it's never been easier to do good. We can punch in five digits in our phone and donate a meal for a family of refugees halfway across the world. We can spread a message of hope and faith to hundreds, even thousand of people in an instant. We can serve our families, our communities and the world in ways our ancestors couldn't even have dreamed of.

What an incredible time to be chosen to be alive.


NOTE: The Kindle version of Looking for Answers Through Dirty Glasses: Finding the Divine in a Challenging World is only 99 cents on Amazon or free if you're a member of Amazon Prime. I hope you like it.