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.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Matchless Wonder →

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 →

Flashing headlines stopped lesser trains of thought that morning, many of us hearing the news for the first time. The busy flow of strangers and hotel employees walking briskly toward their respective conference rooms stopped, and together we stood watching.

The evening before, a young white male had opened fired on members of a historic African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina. Eight members died at the scene, a ninth at the hospital. The victims—Cynthia, Susie, Ethel, Depayne, Clementa, Tywanza, Daniel, Sharonda, and Myra—ranged in ages from 26 to 87. Together that evening, they had been studying the parable of the sower when twenty-one year old Dylann entered the church quietly and was welcomed at the table. He sat with them as they considered the Gospel of Mark and prayed, and then he stood up, uttered a hateful racial speech, and killed nine people in a house of worship.

In the days following, the Charleston shooting continued to command headlines, though not merely in reports of the horrific details as they unfolded. Dylann Roof was apprehended, details of his background given, acquaintances interviewed, inquires made into the gun he used, theories posited on the mindset that lead up to his terrible course of action. But the tragically familiar flow of details following US shootings was interspersed this time with less familiar reporting. Relatives of the victims gunned down at the church faced Dylann merely a day after his actions, offering striking, but not easy, words of forgiveness and mercy. That Sunday, just four days after fellow congregants and their senior pastor were left in a pool of blood in their basement, the church came together for services, the building having been released as a crime scene only hours earlier. Worship commenced as the standing congregation sang of Christ: You are the source of our strength; You are the strength of our lives. Across the city, churches in unison rang morning worship bells in solidarity with Emmanuel AME Church and the victims lost for nine full minutes—a minute for every victim. That evening, a unity chain of clasped hands extended across the 13,200-foot-long Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge from Charleston to the town of Mount Pleasant. The words and actions inspired by this Christian community in lament were a far cry from the “race war” Dylann vowed to the nine victims he would incite with their deaths.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – A Tale of Two Stories →