The recognition of one’s humanity can be an uncomfortable pill to swallow. Life’s fragility, life’s impermanence, life’s intertwinement with imperfection and disappointment—bitter medicines are easier to accept. The Romantic poets called it “the burden of full consciousness.” To look closely at humanity can indeed be a realization of dread and despair.

For the poet Philip Larkin, to look closely at humanity was to peer into the absurdity of the human existence. Whatever frenetic, cosmic accident that brought about a species so endowed with consciousness, the sting of mortality, incessant fears of failure, and sieges of shame, doubt, and selfishness was, for Larkin, a bitter irony. In a poem titled “The Building,” he describes the human condition as it is revealed in the rooms of a hospital, where one finds “Humans, caught/On ground curiously neutral, homes and names/Suddenly in abeyance; some are young,/ Some old, but most at that vague age that claims/The end of choice, the last of hope; and all/ Here to confess that something has gone wrong./ It must be error of a serious sort,/ For see how many floors it needs, how tall…”(1)

With or without Larkin’s sense of dread, the confession that “something has gone wrong” is often synonymous with the acknowledgment of humanity. “I’m only human,” is a plea for leniency with regards shortcoming; in Webster’s dictionary, “human” itself is an adjective for imperfection, weakness, and fragility. Nevertheless, there are some outlooks and religions that stand diametrically opposed to this idea, seeing humanity with limitless potential, humans as pure, the human spirit as divine. In a vein not unlike the agnostic Larkin, the new atheists see the cruel realities of time and chance as reason in and of itself to dismiss the rose-colored lenses of God and religion. Yet quite unlike Larkin’s concluding outlook of meaninglessness and despair, they often (inexplicably) suggest a rose-colored view of humanity.(2) Still other belief-systems emphasize the depravity of humanity to such a leveling degree that no person can stand up under the burden of guilt and disgust.

In deep contrast to such severe or optimistic readings, Jesus of Nazareth adds an entirely different dimension to the conversation. The Jesus admits in his own flesh that while there is indeed an error of a serious sort, the error is not in “humanness” itself. He provides a way for the great paradox of humanity to be rightly acknowledged: both the deep and sacred honor of being human and yet the profound disgrace of all that is broken. So the Christian’s advantage is not that they find themselves less fallen or closer to perfection than others, nor that they find in their religion a means of simply escaping this world of fragility, brokenness, guilt, suffering, and error. The Christian’s advantage is Christ himself. The human Son of God mediates on our behalf, bringing us back to a full and forgiven humanity. In his life, death, and resurrection, the Christian is able to see their own broken humanity and a world that has gone awry in light of God’s severe and merciful pursuit. In his vicarious humanity, we encounter our own.

“[H]umanity’s mystery,” as one writer expounds, “can be explained only in the mystery of the God who became human. If people want to look into their own mystery—the meaning of their pain, of their work, of their suffering, of their hope—let them put themselves next to Christ… If I find, on comparing myself with Christ, that my life is a contrast, the opposite of his, then my life is a disaster. I cannot explain that mystery except by returning to Christ, who gives authentic features to a person who wants to be genuinely human.”(3)

The author of these words was well acquainted with the paradox of human nature and the God who became human to bring the world to authentic humanity. Oscar Romero was a Salvadoran priest who saw the very worst and the weakest of humanity in the corruption, violence, and suffering of a country at war within itself. A witness to ongoing violations of human rights, Romero spoke out on behalf of the poor and the victimized. In both the abused and the abusers, he saw the image of God, glimpses of Christ, and the dire need for Christ’s true humanity. For his outcries, Romero was assassinated in the middle of a church service. He was holding up the broken bread of communion, the very sign of Christ’s human body on earth, given for a broken and hungry world.

Surrounded by reasons to be despairing of humanity, there is yet this startling image of a human who gives us cause to reconsider our despair, one whose only brokenness was at our own hands. Christ is more than someone who came to fix what was wrong. He is the image of all that is right, the bread of life for those who seek to be genuinely human.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Philip Larkin, Collected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993), 191.

(2) Various Atheist bus campaigns offer well-known examples of this, one a few years ago declaring, “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” See Ariane Sherine, “The Atheist Bus Journey,” The Guardian, January 6, 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/.

(3) Oscar Romero, The Violence of Love (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), 112.

I lost my glasses and my keys all in one afternoon. Having stacked back to back appointments, I suppose it was bound to happen. Racing around as I was that day increased the likelihood of error. Other than my keys, I had left everything else in my car—including, I thought—my glasses. After a three hour search of the areas most likely to have my keys, I returned to my car and couldn’t find my glasses either. Desperate calls to the places I had been yielded no results. My glasses and my keys were lost.

The older I get, the more these episodes of forgetfulness seem to increase. Many of my friends who are ever-so-slightly older than me tell me this is the way it is and that I’d better get used to it (or figure out a way to padlock my keys and glasses to me)! The subtle slipping of memory and recall, the fading energy, and the inability to find culturally relevant connections with those younger than me all serve to show me—as the mirror reveals the increasing lines on my face and the graying of my hair—that I am no longer a young woman.

In times like these, I am tempted towards despair. How quickly my youth has gone! Or I can be tempted towards envy of those whose youth and vitality are in their prime. Their exuberance runs circles around my increasingly feeble efforts. In my efforts to keep up, I am drawn to fads and notions for reclaiming youthful energy. Lotions and potions, diets and exercise regimes which promise the fountain of youth lead only to an empty checking account and a bankrupt soul. None of these strategies can erase mid-life regrets or restlessness. Rather than animating creative ideas about living in my life now, I allow it to be tethered to worldly dreams of more, or better, or younger or simply other.

Moses was not a young man when he penned Psalm 90. Yet this psalm was his prayer to the everlasting God as he contemplated his own transient days on earth.

“Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were born, or you gave birth to the earth and the world. Even from everlasting to everlasting you are God. You turn human beings back into dust, and you say, ‘Return, O children of the earth.’ For a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it passes by.”

We are not told what prompted this song of Moses. Perhaps it was written after an endless day of complaint from wilderness-weary Israelites. Perhaps it was written with regret after his violent outburst against the rock would bar him from entry into the Promised Land. Perhaps, it was simply his own lament as he saw his body age and his youth as a distant memory. Whatever event prompted its writing, it is a song sung in a minor key, with great regret. Our days have declined in your fury; we have finished our years with a sigh.

Whether prompted by deep regret, disillusionment, or a simple admitting of reality, Moses reflects on the brevity of life. He compares it to the grass “which sprouts anew. In the morning, it flourishes; toward evening it fades, and withers away.” Before we know it, our lives are past; we finish our years with sighing. In light of human transience, Moses makes a request: “So, teach us to number our days, that we may present to you a heart of wisdom….that we may sing for joy and be glad all of our days….and confirm the work of our hands.”(1) He doesn’t ask for a longer life, or a youthful potion. Instead, he asks the eternal God to remind finite human beings of their limited lifespans in order that wisdom might reign and gratitude would mark even the briefest of stays on this earth.

It was the inevitability of death that motivated this prayer for wisdom. This was a wisdom that didn’t try to hide from aging but rather sought to keep finitude ever before it. Indeed the cry for God to “confirm the work of our hands” demonstrates that numbering life’s days can lead to meaningful engagement in the world and in human work—and this was the mark of wisdom. Perhaps it is a wisdom that can only come from age.

Sadly, the reminders of our own mortality can tempt many towards distraction. Yet it can also lead to wise engagement. In his own brief life, Jesus faced his own death with intention and purpose. “I am the Good Shepherd…and I lay down my life for the sheep… No one has taken it away from me, but I lay it down on my own initiative.”(2) The way of wisdom demonstrated in the life of Jesus gives flesh to the ancient psalmist’s exhortation. As he numbered his days, he calls those who would follow to engage mortality as a catalyst for purposeful living.

While following Jesus insists on the laying down of life in his service, it can be done in the hope that abundant life is truly possible even as one ages and death becomes a more poignant reality. For the one who laid his life down is the one who was raised. He is the everlasting God and a dwelling place for all generations. “I am the resurrection and the life; the one who believes in me will live even though he dies.”

Margaret Manning Shull is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Bellingham, Washington.

(1) Psalm 90:12, 14b, 15a, 17.

(2) John 10:14a-18.

The line between real and imagined is sometimes a little blurry. At least this is the conclusion of one report on the business of cyberspace, where thousands of peoplehave imaginary lives and quite a few are actually making a living at it. The creators of several popular online role-playing games completed a year-long study of the very real transactions that are taking place in their imaginary worlds. The results portray a flourishing economy that is rapidly grabbing advertisers’ attention. The sellers are role players who have taken the time to find marketable goods in their virtual worlds—and they are clearly putting in the time. In one popular game, a gnome is sold with a basic skill set for $214; in another, a virtual cherry dining set for a virtual home runs about 250 actual dollars. Between June 2005 and June 2006, 9,042 role players spent $1.87 million dollars on virtual goods from swords to special powers. According to analyst estimates for 2015, U.S. virtual goods revenue alone will top $1 billion and could even rake in over $2 billion.

It is entertainment I don’t claim to fully understand. But it is fascinating (and maybe worrisome) to see how seamless the real and the virtual can become. Of course, this is a reality that runs through far more than worlds of online gaming. The imagination is always at work in the way we see the world itself; this is both instinctive and instructive. Moreover, to note that something is imaginary is not to dismiss it as void of truth or reality. Fans of Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes cartoon remember significant lines of truth coming from a stuffed tiger. Yet, there are also times that what is not real can become so intertwined with what is real that we scarcely notice a difference. That is, until something real reminds us otherwise—like a jolt of consciousness, an outsider’s perspective, or a credit card receipt.

The Hebrew prophet Jonah was a prophet by profession. He knew the liturgy and worship of the people of Israel by heart. So it is not unreasonable that as his life was ebbing away in the depths of the sea, Jonah would cry out with the words of a psalm he had heard countless times before. And yet, the words no doubt had a depth of meaning for him unlike anything he had known before. As he was losing consciousness—literally in Hebrew, “in the feebleness of his person,”—Jonah not only remembered God by name, but in some ways was seeing God for the first time. Like one awakened to enmeshed worlds both real and unreal, Jonah quickly clung to what was real.

Up until this point Jonah’s behavior suggests a mentality that God was not entirely omnipresent, but present only in Israel, in the temple, and in the places of his own interest. As Jonah ran to Tarshish to avoid the call of God to go to Nineveh, he ran believing there was a place he could go where God could not find him. But as he sunk further into the depths of the sea, the prophet realized that he was mercifully mistaken. His language evokes a play on words—As I was losing consciousness, I remembered the LORD. Or else, it was a sudden recognition of the Really Real in the imaginary world he had occupied. Losing consciousness, Jonah was actually gaining it.

Perhaps not wanting to consider the discomfort it would take to uproot our own embedded fallacies, tellers of Jonah’s story often minimize the distress that broke his silence with God. But the popular notion that Jonah went straight from the side of the ship and into the mouth of the fish is not supported by either the narrative as a whole or Jonah’s cry for help. H. L. Ellison suggests that “[Jonah] was half drowned before he was swallowed. If he was still conscious, sheer dread would have caused him to faint—notice that there is no mention of the fish in his prayer. He can hardly have known what caused the change from wet darkness to an even greater dry darkness. When he did regain consciousness, it would have taken some time to realize that the all-enveloping darkness was not that of Sheol but of a mysterious safety.”(1)

In that mysterious safety, Jonah shows us the strange world that unwound his imaginary one, and in it, the God who hears in both. Though the deep surrounded him and reeds were bound to his head, Jonah was heard—and his awareness of this was an essential turning point in his story. In prayer and darkness, Jonah admitted that the role of salvation cannot be in his hands. If only momentarily, the drowning prophet clung to a truth more hopeful than escapism and far more able than idols: “Salvation belongs to the LORD.”

It is hard to believe that Jonah could have considered being swallowed alive a rescue, and yet it is precisely Jonah’s considerations from which he needed to be rescued. In truth, at times, the deliverance we need most is that of deliverance from ourselves. Though our thoughts toward God be wound in self and seaweed, and the depths of our imagined autonomy threaten to drown us, rescue is indeed a valid hope. What if God is far more real than we often imagine?

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) H.L. Ellison, “Jonah,” The Expositors Bible Commentary, ed. Frank E. Gaebelein (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1985), 374.

I must confess to a certain curiosity with why things turn out as they do. I read a lot of history, biographies, and stories of human successes and failures. Being a child of a particular age, I was raised with a certain degree of optimism. The bad times—World War II, the Korean War—were behind us, and once again we could get back to the normal business of pursuing happiness and success, which I was led to believe were easily within my reach.

Optimism is not hope, yet it is a recurring feature of life in good times. It is also a feature that all too quickly vanishes and reveals itself for what it is when bad times return. As a European, I lived through one of history’s great turning points, a turning point powerfully demonstrated in the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. The wall was not simply a physical reality, which had divided families, a nation, and a continent for decades; it was a symbol of the clash of visions and worldviews that battled for a season, not only for Europe, but for global dominance.

I can well remember the astonished newscasters as Germans embraced each other on top of the despised symbol of separation. Europe and the world seethed with the euphoria of change. The brave new world was being born, and optimism was the mood of the day (1989-1991). I heard breathless gurus of the age proclaim the dawn of unfettered freedom, and one even wrote shortly thereafter about “the end of history and the last man” in the sincere belief of the triumph of free market capitalism and liberal democracy.

Yet wisdom bids us to stop, look, and listen. In the first decade of the twenty-first century we have witnessed 9/11, bombings in Spain, Bali, and London. We have seen the debacles of Enron, WorldCom, and the fiascos of “Bear Stearns” (USA) and “Northern Rock” (UK). Optimism has met its match. Perhaps for some, they are seeing the collapse of hopes and the fulfillment of fears. The movie scene is reflectively filled with apocalyptic and nihilistic visions.

When hope fades, cynicism is often waiting in the wings. And this is indeed one of the great challenges of our time. Skepticism (there is nothing good and I know it) and cynicism (I can’t trust anybody or anything and I know this) seem reasonable choices. But is this a necessary outcome or orientation for us? I think not. Yet, if we have bought into a rationalist vision, if we have embraced the vision and values of our age uncritically, if faith is merely a part-time investment in an over cluttered life, then perhaps we don’t have the necessary orientation or resolve to face the issues and challenges of our time.

The Christian scriptures open up for us a view of the world that is very different: There is a God. This God is the creator, and God is personal, loving, willful, and particular. We see that despite being a good creation, a disruption and disorder has occurred and the drama of redemption unfolds. But the central character here is God! It is what God does, whom God appoints, and what God decides that makes the difference.

This is not to say that life according to Christian theology is pre-determined. I have seen too much, experienced too much, and read too much to believe that my choices are illusory. I believe they are real. I have also seen too much, experienced too much, read too much to believe that our choices are, as Lewis would say, “the whole show.” History is not a fatalist’s game. Humans do act, and often with serious and sad outcomes. The good news, I believe, is that we are not alone!

Writing to the Romans, the apostle Paul reminded them that hope is real because it is anchored in one who is able to carry it, sustain it, and fulfill it.(1) History is moving to an end, and Christ offers a good end. Thus, the difference between optimism, which is short term and easily overcome, and hope, which is eternal and anchored, is where they are rooted. One leans on human effort; the other rests in God and God’s promises.

Stuart McAllister is regional director for the Americas at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Romans 8:24-25, 28-30.

“Do not be afraid,” my instructor encouraged me as my horse continued to back up getting closer and closer to the edge of the trail. The “edge” once crossed would certainly mean that horse and rider would tumble down an eight foot embankment. “Do not be afraid” sounded silly and naïve to me as my horse continued to ignore my increasingly anxious prodding with my arms and legs. “Watch out; beware; don’t ever ride a horse” would have sounded more apropos given these circumstances. I was afraid, terrified even, as my horse backed right over the edge.

Fear is an entirely appropriate and indeed necessary emotion when facing danger. Proper fear ignites the “fight or flight” response in the animal world. And for human beings, we too experience a “fight or flight” response to danger or harm to life. But our response is much deeper than simply the instinct to survive. Author Scott Bader-Saye argues: “We fear evil because it threatens the things we love—family, friends, community, peace, and life itself. The only sure way to avoid fear, then, is to love less or not at all. If we loved nothing, we would have no fear, but this would hardly be considered a good thing.”(1) We feel fear as we are afraid of losing that which we love.

Interestingly enough, more than any other command in the Christian bible, Christians are commanded to “fear not,” and to “not be afraid.”(2) In fact, the admonition to not be afraid is offered up 366 times (one for every day of the year and for Leap Year). And just like my instructor, who uttered those words right in the middle of my horsemanship crisis, so too, the writers of Scripture record these words in the midst of a crisis, or just prior to lives being turned upside down. In the birth narratives of both John the Baptist and Jesus, for example, Zacharias and Mary are told “do not be afraid” even though they are being visited by an angelic being, not a likely or typical visitor. Furthermore, Mary is unmarried, just a young girl. Surely, she must have feared the repercussions of an unplanned pregnancy, including the possibility of her betrothed, Joseph, rejecting her. In the very midst of their worst fears, these and other biblical figures are told not to be afraid.

For many living in today’s world, do not be afraid evokes images of ostriches with their heads in the sand as the world collapses around them. In the wake of the bombings, natural disasters, or personal crises and the mayhem that follows, uttering these words sounds just as naïve and perplexing as my instructor’s words to me right as my horse backed off the eight-foot embankment. We have many, many reasons to feel afraid largely because we feel we have so much to lose. Do not be afraid echoes in our heads, whether or not we claim the Christian faith, and we wonder how to live courageously in a world filled with jagged edges and steep embankments that would seek to claim all that is near and dear to us.

While there are no explicit references to hope in the teaching of Jesus, he too encouraged his followers to “not be anxious” but to trust in the God who could be trusted even in the face of our anxieties. Hope, contrary to what many of us might believe, is not the absence of fear but often arises in the midst of fear. It is both that which anchors us in the midst of the storm, and that which compels us to move forward—however ploddingly—towards goals, others, and the God whom the apostle Paul names the “God of hope” in his letter to the Romans. We hold on to hope, just as I held on while my horse slid backwards with me on her back, down the embankment that seemed without bottom, down to what I feared would end her life and my life. It is a desperate clinging to the God who is mysterious, and of whom we do not have control. There is a mystery in hope because we do not know how God will intervene.

I lived to tell about my horse-riding adventure without even a broken bone—not my own bones, or the bones of my horse. I couldn’t see the wide trail below me that would hold me, and would offer sure footing for my wayward steed. Our lives are often this way; we are often afraid because we cannot see where we will land. In the midst of broken bodies, maimed or decimated limbs, and in the loss of life itself fear can blind, disorient, and dismantle all that was normal before. But hope longs to hold us and to ground us in the midst of our fears. Hope is like a broad place, a wide trail underneath us. And though we know of those who fell and were not caught, though we all know that eventually life will end for all whom we love and hold dear, though we often fear a world destroying itself, the God of hope is at work raising the dead to life: Do not be afraid.

Margaret Manning Shull is a member of the writing and speaking team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Bellingham, Washington.

(1) Scott Bader-Saye, Following Jesus in a Culture of Fear (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2007), 39-40.

(2) Lloyd Ogilvie cited in John Ortberg, If You Want To Walk on Water You Have to Get Out of The Boat (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001), 118.

The last few years have been a time when many familiar things, many things we take for granted, have not only been shown to be fragile but have collapsed or disappeared. Great companies now come and go with a disturbing frequency and things seem to change at an ever-increasing rate. Whether this is real or perceived, the shrinking of space and the acceleration of time are issues felt by many, and they are regular social phenomena.

People generally do not like much change too fast. Yet old boundaries disappear; older values are doubted, questioned, or rejected. Familiar ways get moved or change. Our desire for stability, for security, for some degree of permanence is incessantly pressured by a culture addicted to novelty and the new for newness’ sake. We experience what a friend of mine calls “cultural vaporization.” As water evaporates with a pot of boiling water left on sustained heat, so the many cultural dimensions subjected to constant pressure or deconstruction, they too, evaporate.

The world of the present may not always feel like a human-friendly habitat. Often driven by visions of progress, beliefs in the efficacy of education, freedom, and technology as the means of liberation, the 20th and early 21st centuries appear to have reached the limits or limitations of our created systems. They are not all bad, but they are by definition, limited, a fact that many seem unable or unwilling to admit. Present responses are often important and necessary correctives to the grand strategies of the past, the arrogant sense of mastery, and the delusions fostered by unrealistic views of humanity and our potential, but do they possess the substance that makes for a sufficient response to the deepest issues?

Who and what are we? What is reality? What is the really real and who says so? If there is a transcendent God, if there is a Son who draws near, who has a purpose, a will, and a way for life and creation, then God’s will and way are central to how things operate and how they might operate at their best. The management of life and the path of wise living in Christian terms is called stewardship, and it’s based on a view of economics which implies following Christ as the way and truth and life.

The vision that humanity has built, particularly since the late 18th century unto the present, has been filled with great promises but less than thrilling outcomes. No one denies or devalues all the real and meaningful benefits in science, health, education, and technology, but they are insufficient in themselves to qualify as ultimate goods or sufficient explanations of the good. Their failures and limits are all too apparent.

Yet amidst uncertainty, cultural vaporization, and constant change, there is the promise of the one who said, “I will never leave you or forsake you.” When it seems like all that is solid is melting into air, Francis Schaeffer would remind us that God is there and God is not silent, for Christ has come. Our hopes can anchor onto this one who never changes and offers eternal rest, whose kingdom is eternal, unshakable, and secure. This is indeed a hope that brings new life.

Stuart McAllister is regional director for the Americas at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

They told me to give it three weeks. “Your eyes and your brain are getting reacquainted again,” he said. “Your eyesight will fluctuate for the next few days.” But less than a week after eye surgery, I was tired of fluctuating. At times my vision was so crisp that it was almost too much for me—like I was somehow seeing more than I should. But this clarity came and went; I was sometimes far-sighted, sometimes near-sighted, sometimes neither very well. Perfect sight was not as immediate as I anticipated.

My experience of Christ is not so far from this. Fittingly, I was given the charge of retelling my story—my journey to faith and sight—the same week I was having trouble seeing. The reflective task of peering into my life, looking at patterns and history with the hope of illumination seemed ironic as I squinted to see my computer screen. But it served as a helpful metaphor. My vision of Christ has been far from immediate. It has been much closer to a fluctuating timeline of beholding and squinting, seeing, not-seeing, and straining to see. My experience has been something more like the blind man’s from Bethsaida. “Do you see anything?” Jesus asked after placing his hands on his eyes. The man looked up and said, “I see people; they look like trees walking around” (Mark 8:23-24). Once more Jesus put his hands on the man’s eyes. “Then his eyes were opened; his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly” (8:25).

For those of us who want to relate to Jesus as the God of immediacy, two-staged miracles are cumbersome. I don’t want fluctuating vision. I am leery of winding roads and long journeys. I want to live knowing that he is the one who makes all things new—now. And he is. But Christ also makes us ready to handle it. God is working that we might be able to stand in the very midst of the one who makes all things new—and apparently we are not always ready.

Seeing apparently takes time and patience. Though undoubtedly, we are slow learners, all too often satisfied with walking trees. “Do you have eyes but fail to see?” It is another vision question Jesus placed before many he encountered. The blind man knew enough not to settle with people looking like evergreens. What he saw with his own eyes was something he fortunately knew was less than eyes could see. Though partial sight was itself a miracle, the one who touched him—and he himself—had in mind something more.

How interesting, then, that Jesus’s two-staged miracle takes place following an exchange with the Pharisees who were looking for a miraculous sign that Jesus wasn’t giving, as well as an exchange with the disciples who were in the presence of light itself and yet somehow kept failing to see. Mark seems to be telling us that seeing takes time, that learning to see is a process, but also, that Christ is ever-patient with those who do not see! In our best attempts to consider God, wrote Augustine, we are essentially asking the everlasting Light to “lighten our darkness.” Perhaps the miracle of sight is less like a light switch and more like a series of lights God strings together until we can finally see.

Vision, not unlike redemption, wholeness, or revelation, is at times a process by which Christ must dazzle gradually. Other times we may find ourselves moved nearly to blindness as we encounter more than we have eyes yet to see. But God is always at work in the process, even when all we might be seeing are walking tress. Yet, “do you see anything?” Jesus asks as often we need him, while holding near the well-lit miracle that one day we shall see him face to face.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

Some time ago I found myself speaking at a church in Shrewsbury, the birth place of Charles Darwin. At the end of the message a visitor came up to me. “I have a question that no one has been able to answer to my satisfaction,” he said. “What did Jesus mean when he said, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’”

Some questions take you by surprise, and this was certainly not what I was expecting. I began to explain what was happening on the cross and as I came to explain that Jesus had actually taken sin for us and become a curse for us in order to win our pardon, the man broke down into tears.

“Would you like for me to pray with you so that you might receive Christ and follow him?” I enquired.

“Of course,” came his immediate reply.

It was a joy to pray with him, and as I left I couldn’t help but remember that it is the Holy Spirit “who convicts as to sin, righteousness, and judgment.” I am sure that many people had given a proper answer to him before, but that day was the day when the veil was lifted from his eyes.

Whenever we think about sharing the gospel, two issues immediately present themselves. The first has to do with content: What is it that needs to be said? The second has to do with communication: How will I say it? Sometimes we also talk about motivation: Why should I say anything at all? The last question becomes increasingly relevant as more and more Christians fear that evangelism is not worth losing one’s friends. All of these issues are important. All of them must be addressed. For the words of the Great Commission are clear: “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.”(1)

However, there is one part of sharing the gospel that we rarely hear about. The command to go and make disciples was given to us by a person, by Christ himself. The gospel was not given to us based on our ability to share it. In fact, the Great Commission is sandwiched between two such reminders. Before Jesus tells us to go, he says, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (28:18). And then after he tells us to go he powerfully reminds us, “And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (28:20). Thus, communicating the gospel is first about remembering the authority, power, and presence of the one who calls us to speak.

Not long ago I was across the globe speaking to almost 5,000 people, most of whom were not interested in what I had to say. This was because I had been asked to give a talk to one audience, but I was presented with a completely different context. About half of the audience was made up of children under twelve, which I was not at all expecting. The audience was completely disengaged with me. Twice I stopped the meeting to pray and ask for silence. I have never before felt so inadequate. In the end, I abandoned the message, read a large passage of Scripture, offered a call to repentance, and then closed in prayer. I came down from the podium wanting to hide my embarrassment. My head hung in defeat. But as I looked up, I found myself lost in a sea of over 1000 faces—young and old—many of whom were in tears as they came to pray at the altar.

If the gospel is about God, this shouldn’t surprise us. God is the one who calls and convicts; God is the one who pardons and makes all things new.

Maybe the questions we often ask about evangelism call for a shift in focus. Communicating the gospel as we go about our lives is a command that we have been given. But it is a command given by the one who longs most that the world will hear. It is God who speaks, God who convicts, and God who makes disciples of broken lives. Our gospel has come to us not simply with words, but also with power, with the Holy Spirit, and with deep conviction. Thus, we do well to ask: Who is it we dare and yet long to speak of? How are we describing this God who is like no other? And most significantly, who are we relying on to do so?

Michael Ramsden is international director of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in the United Kingdom.

Early in his ministry, according to Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus preached a very public sermon. This sermon, unlike any other, has not only been a great treasure of literature, but also stands as the foundation of Jesus’s teaching ministry. The introductory illustration of this famous sermon given on a mountainside is a collection of sayings by Jesus about who is blessed in the kingdom of God. They are called the “Beatitudes.”

These beatitudes spoken by Jesus have been widely admired across religious, political, and social realms. Persons as diverse as Jimmy Carter, Gandhi, and the rock musician, Sting, have all quoted these sayings of Jesus. Indeed, Dallas Willard notes, “[A]long with the Ten Commandments, the twenty-third psalm, and the Lord’s prayer…[the Beatitudes] are acknowledged by almost everyone to be among the highest expressions of religious insight and moral inspiration.”(1)

The exact nature of this religious insight and moral inspiration has been the subject of numerous biblical commentaries and writings. Biblical commentator, Craig Keener notes that there are more than 36 discrete views about the sermon’s message.(2) Perhaps the difficulties in interpretation lie with the implications of the Beatitudes themselves. As one author notes, the Beatitudes are “a statement of the world turned upside down, where those who mourn are comforted rather than abandoned or merely pitied, where those who hunger and thirst for righteousness are satisfied, not ignored or shouted down, where the meek inherit the earth rather than being ground into dust.”(3) In other words, much is at stake.  A world “turned upside down” serves as inspiration to some and bad news for others. Indeed, Luke’s account of the sermon adds a series of four-fold “woes” for those who have contributed to mourning, humiliation, and injustice (Luke 6:17-26).

The first beatitude of Jesus is on the “poor in spirit.” I’ve often wondered what it means to be poor in spirit and certainly wondered if being a follower of Jesus included depression or a perpetual frown. The poor in spirit, according to various commentators, include the dispossessed and abandoned ones. In Jesus’s society, these were the persons without hope in this world, the forgotten ones who were left behind. In every way, these were the ones who recognized that they had nothing to offer God in terms of the spiritual requirements of their religious traditions. They were the spiritually destitute. In the ancient world, poverty was often viewed as a spiritual curse whereas riches and prosperity were seen as divine blessing. Poverty and calamity were understood as the results of wrong behavior, as we see in the story of Job. Job’s friends assumed he had done something wrong to bring on his suffering.

And that is why this declaration by Jesus that the poor are blessed and the kingdom of God belongs to them would have shocked its first hearers.

And yet, extending the reach of the kingdom of God to the poor in spirit was part of the messianic mission as foretold by the prophets. Jesus himself understood this, and during a visit to his home synagogue in Nazareth, he read from the scroll of Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor… to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Indeed, Matthew’s gospel gives us a concrete picture of this mission of Jesus in his healing of those who were poor in spirit because of various illnesses. Just before Jesus gave his public sermon, he proclaimed the gospel of the kingdom in word and deed by healing “every kind of disease and every kind of sickness among the people” (Matthew 4:23). These were the crowds who followed him up the mountain where he began to teach. Looking around at those who just received a tangible expression of the kingdom of God coming among them, Jesus proclaimed that these ones—these spiritually destitute ones—were blessed.

The power of the blessings of Jesus is that they are given at the beginning of his sermon, and they are given to those who have done nothing to deserve them. As Fred Craddock notes, “If the blessings were only for the deserving, very likely they would be stated at the end of the sermon, probably prefaced with the conditional clause, ‘If you have done all these things.’”(4) On the contrary, God blesses because God’s grace knows no bounds. For by grace we are saved through faith and not of ourselves…it is the gift of God. There is no one beyond God’s reach, no one who is beyond hope. In the kingdom of God, even the spiritually destitute can come and find their place.

Margaret Manning Shull is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Bellingham, Washington.

(1) Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1998), 98.

(2) Craig S. Keener, A Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1999), 160.

(3) Mary Hinkle Shore, “It’s the Indicatives, Stupid!” in Pilgrim Preaching: Readings for Preachers and Others, November 1, 2003, http://www.pilgrimpreaching.org.

(4) Fred Craddock, “Hearing God’s Blessing,” The Christian Century, January 24, 1990, 74.

In an interview with Mars Hill Review producer Ken Myers, historian John Lukacs spoke of what surprised him most when he first arrived in America to teach at the university. He noticed in the students he taught a total lack of curiosity—and he claims it has only grown worse in passing years. Anything we learn, says Lukacs, is compelled by the curiosity which first caused us to pursue it, to follow a topic where it leads, and in so doing, find out how very little we know.(1) This principle is highlighted in the French 16th century term for an intellectual historian. Such a scholar was called a “curieux,” notes Lukacs. That is, one who is curious.

Sometimes I wonder if curiosity has been replaced by a fascination with the current scandal, gossip, or mystery plastered about the media. Television ratings remind us that there is always something fantastic about a new revelation, a long-lost document, or some controversial new evidence. We are quickly pulled in by the promise of a scandal. We are easily taken with a good mystery. And we are compelled to be up on the latest public frenzy. But I’m afraid such fascination shows not an attitude of curiosity towards knowledge, but an attitude of passivity that eagerly waits to consume the next new thing.

It is not surprising then to watch whatever latest media revelation become a public fascination. Such was the case with James Cameron’s documentary called “The Lost Tomb of Jesus,” as he claimed there was new evidence that a tomb in Jerusalem held the remains of Jesus, his wife, and their son. “It doesn’t get bigger than this,” Cameron said at the press release. “We’ve done our homework; we’ve made the case; and now it’s time for the debate to begin.”(2) The foundations of Christianity were hardly devastated, as some of the headlines promised. But the heads of the masses were indeed turned, if only for a moment. Before the premiere of the documentary, the film’s companion book jumped to the top five best selling books online. The coming and going of May 21, 2011 and Harold Camping’s failed prediction of the end of the world presently held a similar attention. Searches related to his false predictions were top trends on both Google and Twitter for weeks. Not surprising, many used the story as further reason to laugh off religion in general.(3)

When it comes to faith, the novelty of “evidence” that promises to hold our curiosity seems to capture the minds of many. But it is almost always a fleeting fascination based on fantastic speculation, intellectual biases, and poor scholarship. In this sense, neither Cameron nor Camping have produced anything new at all. The end of the world has had no shortage of predictors, despite the fact that even Jesus himself claimed not to know the hour. And of new evidence against belief, there is always a new story. New Testament professor Ben Witherington articulates the state of our culture as it pertains to the latest “findings” that promise to undermine Christianity: “We are a Jesus-haunted culture that is so historically illiterate that anything can now pass for knowledge of Jesus.”(4) And as such, we are easily excited.

But curiosity is bigger than the latest scandal. The claims of Christ will continue to be buried in new doubt and evidence, and Christ will continue to rise above the tombs that claim to hold him. Whether or not you believe this, it is admirable to want an honest investigation, a curious pursuit of history, knowledge, and truth.

The shadows of mystery and suspense are indeed captivating, and the latest findings and failings offer a ready labyrinth to explore. But here we are not meant to reside. The mysteries of Christ and the decisive events of history are best explored not with a love of the newest speculation but with a mind and heart for true mystery. Christ has come into the world; we need not look to the latest scandal to find ourselves standing in awe.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Mars Hill Audio Journal, Issue 75.

(2) “Jesus Tomb Found, says Film-maker,” BBC News, February 26, 2007.

(3) Darrell Dawsey, “The Atheist Perspective: Laughing off the ‘Rapture’ when we should be laughing off religion,” MLive.com, May 23, 2011.

(4) Ben Witherington, “Tomb of the (Still) Unknown Ancients,” Opinion Journal, March 2, 2007.