Thoughts On A Broken World

I’ve been thinking about the brokenness of the world all day, and about how nobody is guaranteed a smooth path.

On Facebook, someone asked why it is that the world’s response to a double standard is to want to level the playing field by enabling the same vices or poor behaviour across the board instead of by holding everyone up to the same high standard.

My answer was that the first option is easier. It’s easier–it is in our control–to lower ourselves to the level of the predators and cheats of the world. It’s easier to become a dog eating other dogs. It’s not within our power as individuals to make anyone else be just, kind, merciful, humble, or loving.

We can always choose to rise above–to consciously decide not to be part of the rottenness of the world–but there’s an obvious consequence to that choice. The way of the world is for the virtuous to suffer from the sins of others (while we all suffer from our own sins).

We struggle with this. Some lose their faith, because a Christianity that promises us rewards on earth won’t give us the staying power to endure the obvious injustice, the reality that the unjust prosper, the just often suffer.

Lord, it’s not fair! we pray, like Job finally driven to lament his plight. Why do we suffer, even when we make the right choices, take the high road? Why is it that the sin and rottenness of the world always seems so much larger, so ever-present, so far beyond redemption?

And the answer is, because we choose. We all choose. And other people’s choices break the world.

Our own choices break the world.

Christ is the glue to patch us together, the solution to our slavery to sin, the promise of freedom. But we can’t escape the consequences of the brokenness of this world while we live.

He has to be reward enough. Wholeness, becoming less and less someone who breaks the world and more and more someone who heals and offers healing…that’s what Christ offers. And that has to be enough. That has to be our reason–that we can’t stand any longer to be part of what breaks the world.

We want our good behaviour followed by rewards, like little children. I did the right thing, now I deserve something good. Even if the reward we crave is just the hope that our efforts might mean something on the large scale to change the fate of the world we live in.

But don’t we try to teach our children that the right thing IS the good? That you should help your sister because she is good and because it is who you want to be? We try to teach our children not to demand a treat every time they do the bare minimum.

***

I told my kids often, that first year separated from my husband, their father, “This is not what I would choose.” It’s not. But I can’t take away my husband’s choice. Even if I could bribe, manipulate, or somehow coerce him into doing what I wanted, I would only do him injury. I would never hold his heart if I did violence to his will.

I had a moment in prayer, early on, when I understood that this is exactly Christ’s position in relation to me.

He will never do me the violence of choosing for me, of removing my freedom. He will only have my heart if I give it to him freely.

***

I think the war between good and evil is played on battle lines that run through every human heart. It’s dispiriting to try to do this salvation thing on ones own terms and strength and fail, and it is dispiriting to aim at transforming the world and find that we can’t even transform our own small corners of it.

But I suck at surrender, so I can’t really blame God for my unwillingness to turn to him when I most need to, when I am most tempted.

That is the road to salvation. Surrender. I will work out my salvation in fear and trembling and constant surrender. And while it feels futile to try and fail and to see so many falling around me, I know there is, truly, freedom from slavery to sin, freedom from my own selfishness and my own brokenness offered to me in that surrender.

I can look back on things I once thought or was once tempted to and feel like I’m looking at an image of a different person. Maybe it is the falling and getting up again that leads to that growth, as slow and incremental as it is. But we really do become more whole, more free, with continued surrender.

***

The weird thing is…as much as the news of the day has been weighing on me today, wearing me down…it’s days like this I doubt less.

It clarifies something for me.

Because when I slip into thinking of my faith as a source of comfort, as an anodyne for the world and something that smooths my path, then I have no answers for this…this ailing world, this world of dismembered children and unfaithful spouses and exploited innocence and everywhere powerful people making profit out of vice and depravity.

If I turn faith into being nice–or if I turn it into following all the right rules to earn a reward–I have no answers for this.

But when I look at the brokenness, the sin, the role we all play in that, the despair of healing ourselves and the utter depravity man is capable of…and how trapped we all are in it…

Then it’s clear. The good news.

The good news is forgiveness and freedom from slavery to sin.

It’s easy to lose sight of it in our plans for self-improvement and our plans for changing the world.

But there it is. Christ came because the world is broken. We are broken, we are drowning in our selfishness and sin.

We need a Saviour. Not to make us comfortable, not to protect us from the cruelty of the world or guarantee us a haven from pain or suffering. We will suffer no matter what we do.

We need a Saviour to save us from ourselves, to give us the strength for the battle within our hearts.

I need a Saviour.

Thoughts on a Broken World