Nehemiah heard the news of Jerusalem. Wars, disaster, fires made the city a disaster. The people in the city were in real and daily danger. The news struck him to the core of his soul and he mourned. When is the last time you’ve been wrecked by the state of your world? Have you felt the sting of a friend walking away from the faith? Have you sent the poverty of the third world country where young women walk for miles to bring dirty water to their waterless town? What wrecks you today? Whatever it is that has your attention, there’s a very good chance that, like Nehemiah, God is calling you to take action. Not everyone weeps about the same thing. Nobody can possibly weep over every injustice in the world, but we all can do, and are called to do at least one thing. For Nehemiah it was a wall and a culture to reform. For you, it might be something as huge as a foster child, or as small as leaky faucet in a community center. Whatever it is, God is waiting for men to weep and then act. For Nehemiah, it was a long journey, a number of years, a lots of struggle before the dream of a righted Jerusalem was realized, but if he could speak to us today, I’m sure he’d say that he lived without regrets. And he’d say to us that we can do this.
Atheism, disillusionment, detachment, terror, and fear saturate our world in darkness. This is where e come in. Martin Luther King Jr. was right: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” We are God’s first option to change the world. And in case you were wondering there is no second option.
This work by Matt Tullos is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International