Repairing The Breach

Personal reflection The concerns of the world are overwhelming. When I was 8, I had a simple plan to deal with the conflict, poverty, and disasters I witnessed on the news. I’d become a billionaire and start a charity (called ‘Save the World’!) with a machine or a pile of cash to deal with every challenge. As I’ve grown older, I’ve become used to ‘tuning out’ the world’s complexity and suffering and focusing on the bits of life that are relevant and important to me. However, like my 8-year-old self, I’m still prone to oversimplification and overconfidence in my grasp of complex situations. Internally, I’m more likely to ask, ‘how can I fix this problem?’ rather than ‘how am I part of this problem?’. We all do this to some degree. Lent provides a chance to step back and reassess our ways of seeing and understanding. To let God recast your vision of the world. Karl Barth famously urged Christians to face the world with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. One way to contemplate the breach is to wonder ‘what would God publish in a newspaper?’ Would it look like our own news sources, or completely different? Musical interlude Listen to or look at the lyrics of the song Ignorance by Kasey Chambers www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEe5b_XvEyo Digging Deeper - Carol Aust 19