What My Life is For...

FROM GARY HAUGEN'S THE GOOD NEWS ABOUT INJUSTICE

Anyone who has spent time with infants knows what amazing machines of tireless learning and curiosity they are. We can also see that during an early stage of development, an infant has no capacity to maintain interest in anything that is not immediately before its eyes. When a brightly colored ball or rattle is held up before babies, their attention is riveted on it. Their eyes seize on the new item with urgent curiosity. They display an almost compulsive urge to touch it, feel it, embrace it. But move the toy out of sight and infants lose all interest. They do not look for it. They do not try to bring back the hand that took the toy away. The do not express any disappointment that the toy is no longer there to explore. As far as child psychologists are able to discern, to babies the toy ceases to exist the very moment it is removed from sight. They have not yet developed the mental capacity for object permanence, that is, the understanding that objects exist even when they are out of sight. It is truly a case of out of sight, out of mind.

I must confess that this is very much the way my mind often works when it comes to maintaining an interest in the reality of injustice in our world. I read about innocent people being slaughtered in Rwanda on page A1 of the Washington Post, and I am appalled. But my mind moves onto other things with amazing speed and thoroughness when I read on page D15 that the movie [I was] hoping to see actually starts a half hour earlier than [I] thought. When I read about the way abandoned orphan girls in China are tied to their bed rails and left to starve and die in state-run orphanages, I am very nearly moved to tears. But a year later when a conversation with a friend reminds me of the article, I realize that I have not shed a tear, uttered a prayer or even given it thought since the day I put down that newspaper article. I can move from torture on the evening news to touchdowns on Monday Night Football with almost the same mental and emotional ease as my channel changer.

Of course, much of this is perfectly natural and probably healthy. I do not aspire to be someone with a psychotic fixation on evil and human suffering. It s a poorly lived life that cannot experience joy, peace, laughter, beauty, and mirth despite all the oppression and injustice that mars the goodness of God's creation. If the evening news or the morning paper keeps me from [going] to a movie, from laughing at [] stories or from enjoying the exhilaration of a bike ride on a crisp fall day, then something is surely out of balance.

But we can grow into a more mature way of engaging the reality of injustice in our world if we take just two steps: (1) We can develop a compassion for the people suffering injustice by looking through the eyes of missionaries and other Christian workers who see this suffering firsthand, and (2) we can prepare ourselves to help people by looking at them through God's eyes, that is, through his Word.

Perhaps a next step in our development as children of God is a capacity for compassion permanence - a courageous and generous capacity to remember the needs of an unjust world even they are out of our immediate sight. Not content with the infant's out-of-sight, out-of-mind approach, God calls us to a grown-up capacity to engage a world of oppression with our heart and mind, even though (thankfully) it is not always before our eyes.