Lights Piercing a Shattered World

I don’t know much about politics—but I do know that the world is broken.

All you have to do is turn on your TV to see it. The killings. The poverty. The latest natural disaster, or car chase, or suicide.

It’s everywhere, this darkness.

The pain infects our shattered world, and it scares us. It scares us to our core.

The minute I try to scroll through my Facebook feed, I see them. The voices crying for change. Screaming, pleading, desperate for relief. Desperate to not live in fear, to walk into their schools and be safe. Desperate for the shadows of this world to be dragged into the light.

Desperate for peace in a world that was born chaotic.

Our world is shattered, and no one is quite sure how to fix it. How do you save a world that thrives off of the same poison that’s killing it? How do you fix a shattered society that’s made up of broken people?

I believe that we should fight for the light. For rightness, for justice, and peace, and a standard of good. We should fight for hope.

But we also live in a flawed world. We will never have perfect justice, a perfect government or a perfect world. Because our world is made up of painfully imperfect people—and this earth is shrouded in the darkness of those sinful people.

And I think sometimes we forget that.

We forget what this world is. We forget what it was made to be.

What it became.

This world is a dark place. Adam and Eve’s dissention unleashed the thorns and fangs of sinful man onto a world that was originally created perfect. Created in wholeness—but broken by us. By our selfishness.

By us wanting what we wanted, not what was his best.

And try as hard as we might, no matter how loudly we yell or what law we pass or what firearm is confiscated—we can’t change that. We can’t heal a world that was broken long before any of us was born.

A world that was shattered by our selfishness.

And you know what?

That’s okay. Because earth, this planet we’re on right now, this sin-stained ground…

It wasn’t meant to be healed in the present.

But the people of this world were.

Our dark souls were made to be stitched back together by a God who is Wholeness itself. By a God who gave us a choice, who saw us turn from him, who has watched our tears fall and seen our fingers squeeze triggers and create bruises and leave grown men sobbing.

That God has seen us at our worst, has looked into our broken hearts—and loves us.

He chooses to save us.

So, yes, fight for rightness—but more than that, fight for wholeness.

Start right where you are. Look past yourself at the billions of souls around you who are still searching for the light. Still searching for the answer to their scars and anger and pain. Still trying to find a way to be whole.

Because you have it. You have the answer. You have the light that can pierce this shattered world. He is living inside of you, this God who can mend the hurting and wipe away our tears. Who can replace fear with joy and peace.

I don’t have the answers to our broken world, but there is one thing I do know—

If we reached out to the forgotten ones, to those living in darkness, and brought a message of hope that could heal and light that could save, then maybe we would start to see a healing far beyond anything words can give.

Maybe then we would see broken people begin to heal. Broken souls find wholeness. Maybe we would see God healing the scars in the way that only he can.

And as broken people begin to find wholeness, then our broken world might begin to find healing too.

It starts with me.

It starts with you.

With not hiding anymore. With not just shaking our heads at the carnage, but reaching our hands out to the broken. To sharing the hope that we have in us.

Because we live in a shattered world, but sometimes, it’s in the broken places that the light shines the brightest.