New Outcomes

With change everything and anything is possible.  New Year’s resolutions, governments coming into office, and putting new ideas into practice all come with inherent risks.  It is far easier to focus on the positive than it is to evaluate and measure the potential negatives.  Even with the best of intentions, manifestos, resolutions, and ideals quickly change in the light of trying to make everything new.  Having a firm sense of the objectives (intent), tactics (processes), and procedures (disciplines) is crucial.  Yet all the good intentions, robust processes, and disciplines will not always prepare you for the reality of what could and probably will happen.  Bluntly put, “they are going to throw you out of the meeting places.  There will even come a time when anyone who kills you will think he's doing God a favor.” (John 16.2)
 
I wonder how committed I am to the principles and values I say I hold dear.  Will I stick with them in the midst of the battles and storms?  Are they worth the things I hold dear, up to and including my life?  Will I always strive to hold them close or will I compromise when things get tough?
 
On a bright, clear, and sunny morning it is easy to be resolute.  Everything is out on the table.  Everything is within our grasp, game on!  Everything is possible.  Yet yesterday’s storm clouds remind one that things are not always as rosy as they seem.  Kids are dying in streets at the hands of their peers.  People disappear without a trace.  Strangers wonder our beaches, lost in the corners of their mind, unable to speak or communicate.  Each person involved is someone’s child, someone’s friend, and someone’s beloved.  God’s tears fall with the knowledge of the pain, anguish, and heart ache inherent in being part of this world.
 
We can do something about this.  We can be part of God’s solution.  The times ahead will be rough, times hard, and our lives will be at risk.  Yet the potential outcome, seeing mercy, acceptance, and love realized is worth everything.