Fix It....

Driving through the South Park neighborhood and the Lamar campus the day after Hurricane Humberto visited us, my two year old son became quite upset. He began looking around and crying out plaintively, "Fix it! Ben fix it!"

My wife and I couldn't quite figure out what he was talking about until we really looked at the landscape around us. The whole area featured limbs and branches scattered on the road and lawns, landscaping uprooted, whole trees that had fallen over onto fences and yards. Ben was upset that things were not the way they were supposed to be, the way he knew they should be.

At a very early age, Ben is discovering that the world is not as it should be, and that it is easier to destroy than it is to build up...whether that is by natural or human hands. And he embodies that childlike quality that wants to mend what is broken, even if it isn't possible.

The world we live in is broken--more often by our own hands than by nature's--and I wonder whether we still possess the naive desire to try and fix it. It's naive because it can't be done by ourselves alone...but that desire is something God uses as we join in the divine work of mending the world.

Originally posted 9/14/07.