I don't understand this world.

I don't understand this world.

I don't understand the fascination with the cheap and tawdry. I don't understand glorifying cruelty, greed and selfishness. I don't understand how we've become a culture that celebrates adultery and puts such a cheap price on life.

I don't understand.

I don't understand why we spend billions on weapons of war, and why other countries do too, when there are starving children....on almost every continent. I don't know why we manufacture outrage over celebrity gossip when people are still being sold as slaves. I don't know why we spend so much time arguing with each other over petty crap when people are being beheaded and crucified for their faith.

I don't understand.

I hope I never do.

I hope that the madness of this world never makes sense to me, that I can always see the horrible, heartbreaking wrongs. I hope that every time I start to look away or become jaded, that God breaks my heart anew for the things that really matter.

I pray that as I get involved in my own life and my own sense of what "should be" that God remolds my heart and teaches me again to have greater compassion on all the hurting, broken people made in His image.

We can't completely fix this world; too many selfish agendas will get in the way. But we, we who feel the call to do something, can always do a little to make this world a little more bearable. We can shine like little candles in the gathering darkness, we can ease burdens with kind words, helping hands and open hearts.

But it will take more than us to set things right in the end; it will take God. But that plan is already in motion, He will fix this, the countdown was set upon a hill called Golgotha, where three crosses stood, and the Lamb was offered up.

God sees our shattered lives, our needy souls and yearning hearts, and He will act. He will heal this, He will set it right, this will all be made whole again.

He has promised it to be so, and His word is eternal.

Whenever I look at the world in bewilderment and sorrow, I think of the words of Elizabeth Elliot, who said, "Leave it all in the hands that were wounded for you."

Our little hands can, and should, apply bandages as best we can to this wounded world. But the hands of the Great Healer, those scarred, beautiful hands, they will be the hands that cause it all to be well, that make the world make sense again.