"...in its time I will hasten it."

i think that the smaller the world is to you and i, the harder it is to have a big-picture view of what's actually happening.

Your thoughts probably just went something like this, if i had to guess: "Wow, there is no way you could have made a more obvious statement just then." Believe me, i realize that it seems really elementary and almost circular to say what i said, but give it a second chance. There's more depth there than you realize at first glance.

Think about it: we can access all kinds of news and stories and pictures and even live videos from all over the world in less than seconds. To you and me--Americans and Western Europeans and basically people with money and access to technology--to us the world is incredibly small. And the reason it's small is not because our knowledge of it is limited in scope. No, quite the opposite. The very reason the world has become so small is that our knowledge (at least, our potential for knowledge) of it is so immeasurably vast compared to what it has been since its creation or chance appearance or whatever you happen to believe. That's why what i said is actually extremely unintuitive. It would seem that to those of us with access to the world's unbelievable depth and complexities that we would have a more developed sense of big-picture ideologies and world-views. And yet i find that the opposite is overwhelmingly true. Not only is it true but it is starkly obvious to the "rest of the world." To those whose world is still quite large.

You see, we could get on CNN.com right now and see all kinds of atrocities being committed in Darfur and Tibet and all over the world. The reason we see those things is because we have financial and societal resources that those people affected do not have. And yet we largely do nothing. Not only do we do nothing for those hurting people, but because we are so "in touch" with the rest of the world, we completely forget that even in our own wealthy nation there are hurting and dying people in our very midst. And yet we largely do nothing.

And so it seems that we are a people persecuted not by weapons of physical pain and violence, but rather weapons of intellectual and emotional anesthesia. We have so much knowledge that we have forgotten what it means to have sympathy. Our brains are so full of junk that our hearts have atrophied into blood-pumping organs at best, and frozen stones at worst. We have tried to take Michelangelo's painting from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and place it on a note card in our wallets. The world is so accessible to us and yet we fail to realize that behind all of the stories of joy and sadness, victory and anguish, and peace and violence, there are still people there. Real human beings, just like you and me. Men and women and children created in the very image of God Himself.

That is the Big Picture, i think. The picture of God creating a people whom He loves more dearly than anything else in all the universe. The picture of Him as the King who is even now establishing a very real Kingdom. The picture of a grand invitation to join Him as He works in this broken, messed up, sin-filled world of ours. The picture that somehow welds together the colors of Grace and Truth, Love and Justice, Freedom and reigning servants. How can we see that picture and not feel a passion for the hurting people around us, and around the world? How can we continue to ignore the pain and suffering of those whom God loves just as dearly as He loves us?