A shocking story appeared in the Times of India, about a teenager, thirteen years of age, who had taken to prostitution because of her obsessive craze for high-end gadgets and mobile phones. The mother, who runs a grocery shop, did not have any clue of her daughter’s act until the girl spilled the beans abruptly, fearful that she had become pregnant. The shocked mother tried to explain to the teenager that prostitution is illegal and immoral, but the girl refuses to stop or to see anything wrong in the act. She reveals that she had been working independently and booked her clients through a secret secondary phone. The counselor who attended to the teenager noted that she seemed unphased and took quite some time to respond to the counselling, simply repeating in a matter-of-fact tone that, she was strapped for money and unable to buy the latest gizmos and gadgets that her friends used.

This, perhaps, is not an isolated incident but a reflection of a trend among us these days. The young (or, most of us, for that matter), have become so gadget-crazy that they not only draw pleasure, but also their identity from the gadgets that they possess. In his book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, Jaron Lanier, one of the pioneers of virtual reality (in fact, the one who first coined the term “virtual reality”), talks about the reductionist tendencies prevalent in the field of Computer Science—for example, reducing thinking to mere “information processing” and prostrating oneself before machines. He points out further, that every software program embodies a personal philosophy: “[I]t is impossible to work with information technology without also engaging in social engineering….People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time.”

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – You Are What You Possess →

For anyone who has ever been troubled by the lone sock left at the end of the laundry, help is on the way, and it comes in the form of indignation: Who ever said socks had to come in pairs anyway? At least that is the rebellious philosophy of one sock manufacturer who is single handedly trying to change the way we see “the sock problem.”(1) “The missing sock is never going to go away,” said one of the company’s founders, insisting that this is a way to have fun with one very small real-world problem: “People lose their socks… Let’s embrace the problem, and run with it.”(2) Currently they have in circulation over six hundred thousand socks, all sold without matches in packages of 1, 3, or 7.

Type A personalities aside, the embracing of mismatched socks actually seems to be catching on. I happen to think the idea is clever, particularly among the target market (girls age 9-13), but I also think it may indeed be one more logical outworking of a current philosophical state of mind. “Imbalance by design—and the studied quirkiness it reveals—is everywhere,” notes one cultural observer.(3) Random is the new order, as Apple insisted a few years ago. Whether selling music or socks, in the constant undertow of marketing, the spirit and mood of the age is keenly, if cleverly, seen. But imbalance by design is still by design.

Physicist and Nobel laureate Leon Lederman once jokingly remarked that the real goal of physics was to come up with an equation that could explain the universe but still be small enough to fit on a T-shirt—or perhaps a twitter feed. With such a challenge in mind, Oxford scientist Richard Dawkins offers up his own one-lined slogan: “Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators.” This is to say, as he has said elsewhere, the watchmaker is blind. The universe has neither design nor purpose; it exhibits nothing but blind pitiless indifference.

But if the universe has always been a disordered series of time and matter and chance, I’m not alone in my need to understand how we account for the intricate orderedness to life, the uniformity of nature, even the intricacy of the very mind that asks the question. How is it that we can ever accept the non-random consistency of nature in a random world? And what would it really look like if random was the new order? Even in the nonconforming concept of mismatched socks, the factories making them still exhibit a scrupulous degree of order; each random sock is designed and produced with creativity and intent.

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The trial of Dylann Roof has made national headlines for several months, culminating in his being sentenced to death for the murder of nine African American Christians. Welcomed by the participants of the bible study without question, his sinister intentions were executed as heads bowed in prayer. As the news stories retold the testimony of those who survived, the horror was palpable. And in the aftermath of the horror, the tragedy of lives lost in this way while at a church bible study is overwhelming. It is no wonder that some of the relatives of those murdered were filled with rage.

But the real wonder of the trial coverage is the forgiveness offered to Dylann Roof by the majority of the bereaved. “The hate you possess is beyond human comprehension,” Melvin Graham, a brother of one of the victims, Cynthia Hurd, told the young white supremacist seated across the courtroom. “You wanted people to kill each other. But instead of starting a race war, you started a love war.” One victim’s sister-in-law offered to come and pray with Roof before he went to prison if he wanted her to do so. In fact, five family members offered Mr. Roof a measure of public forgiveness at his bond hearing held just two days after the killings.(1)

As I read these news stories, I am in awe of these who understand—in a way I cannot comprehend—that forgiveness is at the heart of Christian faith. Certainly, I understand how an unwillingness to forgive locks us all up in bitterness, and throws away the key. It enslaves us to ingratitude, and chokes out gratefulness. It prevents us from experiencing the freedom that comes with free-flowing grace—both received and given. And I understand all too well that a desire to punish those who have hurt us can easily arise from a sense of moral superiority that deems punishment as more fitting than grace. And yet, these five family members chose to forgive a young man who appears not to recognize his need for it.

Jesus once told a parable of an unforgiving servant in response to a question from his disciple Peter. This servant owed his master a debt so large it could never be repaid in this lifetime. When his master forgave him the debt, he went out and would not forgive his fellow servants their relatively small debts. Peter had asked the question, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” Jesus answers, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven.”(2) Jesus taught that forgiveness is unlimited, and forgiveness by nature is something that cannot be measured in its appropriation. When we fail to forgive, we fail to recognize our own debt, and we fail to appreciate the reality of the limitless scope of forgiving grace on our account. Peter wanted to know at what point he could cease from offering forgiveness—he wanted a hard and fast limit. But in the answer to Peter’s question, Jesus reveals that none of us are in the position to withhold forgiveness from each other. In the end, since we are all in need of forgiveness, to withhold it demonstrates a kind of ingratitude for God’s gracious action towards the debt we could never repay to God.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Giving Forgiveness →