Absolute Moral Truth

I will never forget the day I lost my innocent perception of the world. I was playing at a friends house immersed in my free time from school when breaking news came pouring over the television in the background. There had been a massive auto accident involving many people and a possible fatality. I remember watching it in shock as the images poured over the screen. I became entranced with the reporters commentary seemingly unaware of the world as my 7 year old mind tried to wrestle with the horror I was witnessing.

 

Just then my schoolmate looked at me and said, “Forget that, let’s go play. That stuff happens every day”.

 

No doubt the look on my face expressed my profound concern and shock. I wasn’t sure if I had simply been sheltered or just been completely unaware but at that moment I refused to believe the truth. I argued with my friend that there was simply no way that auto accidents happened every day. How could that be? Why wasn’t something being done? It simply did not register in my childish mind how this had become so commonplace and now regarded as unimportant.

 

He laughed profusely at my ignorance and I quickly retreated my point pretending that I had been joking and certainly not that ignorant of “how things are”.

 

So many of us would look back to a moment like that and laugh it off and mark it up to childish ignorance. But this didn’t have anything to do with my uninformed childhood perceptions, on the contrary it was a deeper problem that I simply could and still will not accept. From as early as I could remember I simply did not understand abject suffering and more importantly the lack of a resounding answer to it.

 

The age of information has flooded our minds with the sheer volume of unspeakable human atrocities that run rampant all over the world. Cancer, AIDS, genocide, starvation, crime, and other unspeakable acts will end the lives of millions of innocent lives. How can this be? As I grew up I began to ask the question that any human being with a heart should ask.

 

Why?

 

More importantly for someone of faith an even more difficult question. If God is real, and He loves us, then why doesn’t He intervene? Where is God in all of this suffering?

 

I received my answer in the summer of 1997.

 

I had traveled over 15,000 miles and found myself in the 3^rd world country of eastern South Africa. I went with Teen Mania Ministries, a small Christian NPO out of east Texas, that sends teenagers all over the world doing rescue aid to countries in need. Apartheid had only recently been abolished and the tension between whites and blacks was still very prevalent. Needless to say the conditions that many native Africans lived in were beyond bleak. One particular day we visited a small village in a coastal city that had been severely affected by governmental agencies preventing aid to their region for “political reasons”. We were so desperate to help that we entered their only clinic to do what we could.

 

I walked in one person; I would walk out someone completely different.

 

The human mind cannot begin to explain or comprehend what it is like to enter a third world hospital. It embodied the most atrocious living conditions you can possibly imagine. My mind continued to reel in astonishment as I couldn’t escape how this environment was even possible in our “civilized world”. The smell alone was almost too much to handle even without the horrific things my eyes witnessed.  

 

We held babies stricken with leukemia and HIV, visited men and women dying of illnesses the modern world had long since cured. It was extremely difficult not to let it all breed hatred towards the complacency of my own country. As tears streamed down my face, I prayed for them giving everything I had in my pockets in a vain attempt to help ease their pain.

 

What amazed me the most is that not one of them wore a frown, not one complained, not one of them even showed a hint of their obvious pain and turmoil. They all smiled in joyful delight and marveled at us in amazement just for being there at all. It was ironic that the only sad faces were worn by the only ones who had nothing to be sad about.

 

As we were leaving I met a man named Robert who had been a paraplegic for 6 years. He had lost his wife, children in a massive automobile accident that almost took his life. He had been lying in a bed alone for years with no hope to ever walk again. With a simple act of kindness, I prayed for him; all I did was pray and tell him that God had sent me just to tell him He loved him. He wept, sobbed, and by the end of that day he sat up for the first time in nearly a decade.

 

Where was God? Ask Robert I bet he’d tell you.

 

And to the skeptics, Robert had decided only days before that he was going to chose THAT DAY to end his life. He had told the entire nursing staff long before our arrival he was no longer going to eat and was at the end of his self imposed suicide when we showed up. Was it a mere coincidence that I had traveled half way across the world just in time for someone to hear the only thing that would give him hope? If you believe that, then you have more faith than I do.

 

I realize this does not satisfy the deep seated anger that many share and direct towards God or “religion” because not every story has a happy ending. Sometimes our loved ones die of cancer, sometimes little kids die in wars, and instead of finding fault or passing blame, maybe out of our darkest hour there is something we need to see that had we not endured that dark place we could have never seen before. The brightest days are always preceded by the darkest nights.  

 

Fighting moral decay isn’t about winning the argument, curing world hunger, or eradicating poverty; while those remain our goals we strive to make a difference one person at a time. The fight is about the impact we make on those around us that we can help, influence, and change for the better.

 

All those years ago I made the decision to fight, to not allow the depravity of my surroundings control my actions, to not wallow in the pain around me and to pierce the darkness with a single ray of hope. Robert lived for many years after my encounter with him. He spent the remainder of his life upright spreading the hope he had been given by God, and I would do it all over again even if just for Robert.

 

Thanks to Robert I no longer have the need to ask why.