The World We Live In
I just spent the last 30 minutes browsing my various social media sites: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc. and in those 30 minutes I because very nervous about the world we live in.
First thing I clicked on was a link to a video made by the non-profit The Center for Medical Progress (I’m not posting the link here, it’s a disturbing video). The video showed a disturbing conversation about abortions that lead to the selling of the abort body parts. Hearts, lungs, livers, even legs, are being sold to people who can order them online. If you’re asking yourself “say what?” I did the same thing, while trying not to lose the lunch I just ate.
I know abortion is a hot topic. I know that there are people on different sides of this topic and sometimes people aren’t generally nice to one another when discussing with someone who might disagree with them. However, I would like to think that we can all be on the same side — the human side — and agree that nobody, get that? No-body — should be exploited or sold. No one should make a profit on another’s body. Can we agree on that?
We can’t use one another as a means to advance. I’m not sure what people do with aborted baby body parts, nor do I want to know. As a society, are we willing to sacrifice the human race to get ahead? I think the world tells, us yes, but in reality, I think most of us would say “Absolutely Not!”
Now, on a lighter note, I also saw the video of Teens Reacting to Encyclopedias. This made me laugh and kind of sad. It was funny to watch them not know where to begin to look up the passage on reading. It was sad to think that encyclopedias are being switched out for the internet. (Side note: when I was in school, I could never trust the internet, not because it wasn’t full of information, but because I was in search of scholarly information. Encyclopedias provided that — ahh the fond memories of the Encyclopedia of Religion!) The amount of information at our fingertips is astounding, but I worry we don’t know what to do with that information; we don’t know how to turn it into knowledge, and heaven forbid, we eventually get into the wisdom category.
This is why I’ll be sad if all books go the way of vinyl records or cassette tapes: if everything is available to us instantaneously, if all we need is the CTRL+F button, how are we supposed to absorb the richness of the information? I know encyclopedias were a pain for research, but the amount of work I had to put into finding what I was looking for made that information that much better, I actually read what I found (because by golly, if I was putting that much time into it, you bet I was going to enjoy that short passage on Resurrection.). Too often when I use CRTL+F, I quickly glance at what it brings up and if it isn’t what I need then I move on. We move on too quickly and lose whatever sense of goodness that passage may have contained.
What does this have to do with anything? Well, I guess I’m worried that just like information, we try to CRTL+F the people in our lives, our communities, in our world. If they aren’t what we want or expect, then we’ll just gloss over them. Never really taking the time to get to know them and discover their wisdom. Maybe that leads to ignoring a homeless person or not giving money to charity or not standing up for someone who is being abused or knowing that there are 27 million people still in slavery today and not speaking up about it or letting aborted bodies be sold for parts — I’m not sure.
I do know that I want to live in a world where all people are respected and loved and have the right to live and be happy and change the world. I want to live in a world where the light in a child’s eyes is never extinguished. Their hope never fades away. It is the light in a person’s eyes or the hope that they have that reignites our own light, our own hope.
So, I want to leave you with another video that came across my social media feeds today. It is a homemade video by the group Gungor for their song “Light.” It is about their daughter who was born with Down Syndrome. To read more about their story click here. But I want to leave you on a light note, to see the light in the eyes of someone so innocent, so loved, so special, and I hope that if you need a little bit of light in your life, this helps to start the spark, and that we can be the change in this world that we live in:
