Today as I listen to the news there have been 2 mass shootings in a 24 hour period  with a combined total of 30 people dead at the time of this writing.  But this is not an article about gun control.  It’s about attitudes, about caring compassion towards one another regardless of which side of the political debate you stand.

Have we as Christian people contributed to a culture of judgmental self-righteousness? A world where hate and evil rule even and among a people charged to love one another, to be encouragers and to help lift one another up to the next level.

We can blame social media, news organizations, politicians, school systems, etc but if we never take a hard look at ourselves and how we as individual’s contribute to this current culture there will be no change.  Do we sit for hours listening to one sided news
programs?  do we laugh at or even share posts/tweets that are inflammatory put downs? do we somehow think we are better than someone else because we’ve made better choices without stopping to recognize that we’ve been able to make better choices perhaps because we’ve had opportunities that others have not?

From a global perspective, I recently heard Wenyan Yang, UN, state that one of the best determiners of how well someone will do is largely based on what country an individual is born into.  I’m pretty sure that none of us have had a choice in determining where to be born. 

While it can be said that few of us have gotten to where we are in life without making good choices and putting in the hard work, the opposite of that statement is often not true. There are countless people who have made great life decisions and have worked hard but just never seem to “get the right break.” An individual may have studied/worked hard and is “deserving” of a position but if there are no positions open . . . Or two contenders for a position may be equally qualified but one was born into a “good” family and has great contacts/references . . . Some of us were born without a tendency towards alcoholism or addictions.   Some of us were simply born with a greater capacity for learning or self-awareness that helps us to form better relationships.

It is time for us to recognize that though our hard work and positive life decisions have contributed to our success  many of the factors that have gone into our success are outside of our control.  Dare we count them as God’s grace on us and ‘to those who have been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked (Luke 12:48 NIV)’. Could it be that we are being required to offer compassion, mercy and a little hope to those who are oppressed by life’s circumstances?