On a routine trip through well-worn streets, I found myself pulled out of the fragmented consciousness of a mind captive to the day’s worries with the jarring lyrics of a song. Up until that point, the song itself was much like the familiar patterns of scenery, an external factor impervious to the siege of my own fears; I was seeing but not seeing, hearing but not really hearing. But then I suddenly took in the artist’s abrupt words: Hoping to God on high is like clinging to straws while drowning.(1)

The stark image of clinging to straw while desperately trying to stay afloat cleared everything else from my mind. It also set me thinking about the descriptive words of a friend hours earlier. Encouraging me in the midst of a difficult place, a friend simply reminded me that I was not alone. She was intending to assure me of her friendship and support, but I also knew she was assuring me that I was not aimlessly floundering on my own, with God no where to be found. “The LORD is near to all who call on him,” declares the psalmist; and I needed to hear it.

Christians take comfort in the thought that God is among us, comforting our fears, quieting our cries of distress, standing near those who call, moving in lives and history that we might discover the God who is there. As a follower of Jesus, knowing that he is with me as a fellow human in struggle and darkness is one of the only reasons I don’t completely surrender to my fears and stop moving forward. Knowing that there is a God of grace, beauty, truth, and mystery, which the Spirit is constantly at work lifting me toward, is the hope I remember when I fear death, my console when I fear uncertainty, the picture that somehow makes sense of a strand of DNA and quiets my fear of being uncared for and alone. I can relate to the resolution of the psalmist in a world of many and distant gods: “But as for me, it is good to be near God. I have made the Sovereign LORD my refuge” (73:28).

But what good is it if there is indeed a throne but it is empty, a kingdom without a king, a god who may be close but is like straw? Who is it who is near us? If god is an impersonal force, or a tyrant, or a distant, semi-interested being, then neither God nor God’s kingdom is any sort of refuge. If the hope we cling to is like straw that cannot actually save us from drowning then we have good reason to live in fear, “huddled,” as the musician later describes, “afraid if we dance we might die.”

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – When God Is Near →

The announcement this past week that the pop/rock musician Prince died from an overdose of fentanyl confirmed what had been suspected since his untimely death in April 2016. Prince had become addicted to prescription opiate painkillers. Sadly, his was a very public face to what many are calling an epidemic. Though a devoted Jehovah’s Witness and by all reports fastidious about his health, his attempt to alleviate chronic pain morphed into an addiction that eventually took his life.

Over the past two years, there has hardly been a week without a headline or sobering story concerning the record number of deaths from opiate overdose in the United States. A New York Times article announced an unexpected rise in the death rate for the United States. Death rates—the number of deaths per hundred thousand people—have been in decline for many years, the article noted. Yet a sharp rise has occurred, in part, because of the prescription drug epidemic. If the rise continues, the researchers noted, it could be a signal of distress in the overall health of the nation.(1)

The struggle with chronic pain and the difficult and complex task for professionals who treat it made me wonder about how societies deal with pain in general. In a recent article from The Economist called “The Problem of Pain,” global treatment and attitudes toward pain were explored in light of the U.S. epidemic of opiate prescriptions and overdose. The author notes that when illness strikes, patients in poorer countries expect to suffer. Even when the tumor on his hip grew to the size of a football, Mato Samaile, a frail 50 year-old Nigerian cattle farmer, was reluctant to go to the hospital. “When I found the lump I said to my son: ‘We can’t leave the farm. We should stay until after the rain falls.’” Amina Ibrahim, a surgeon at the hospital where Mato was eventually admitted, notes, “People are brought up to tolerate pain. If you don’t you are a coward. That is just our culture. So even doctors are not liberal on painkillers.”(2)

Of course, in many parts of the world, there is little or no access to any kind of palliative care or pain management. The Economist reported a story about a young boy with cancer in rural India. He had visited several clinics nearer to his home in search of pain relief before stumbling into a Hyderabad hospital, ragged and short of breath. It had taken him more than 12 hours to get there, and he died soon afterwards.(3)

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Problem of Pain →