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Something is not right with our world.

-by Ruth Senter

Somebody out there is crazy," the woman in the chair next to mine at the beauty salon says. She is referring to the possibility that a bomb may have brought down an airliner carrying 230 people to their deaths in the dismal waters of the Atlantic Ocean.

"How could that person live with himself?"

No one even attempts to answer her question. We all just sit there.

"Something is not right with our world."

Here her soliloquy ends and we are left with our thoughts.

Something is not right with our world.

What a profound insight that woman has.

Several days later I am at a Bio-ethics conference. I listen to a father talk about the agony of watching his two young children dying from a rare genetic disorder. He tells of holding a son in his arms, of saying "good-bye" and "Daddy will see you again someday in heaven." The father has already bid farewell to his oldest son who has died several years earlier.

I listen to the talk and this thought weighs heavy: Something is not right with this world.

But at the end of the father's talk, we stand and sing:

This is my Father's world
Oh let me ne'er forget
That though the wrong seems oft so strong
God is the ruler yet.

Something is not right with this world. But it is not cause for panic. God is not caught off-guard by terrorists' bombs and genetic disorders. He is allowing wrong to have its final fling. (It has, of course, been having its final fling for a very long time.) Someday God will say, "Enough." And wrong will be forever done in.

Meanwhile, God is the ruler yet. Let us not forget. For our ability to be hopeful in the midst of a world gone wrong may just well be the most crucial of all our tests of faith.

-Ruth Senter is writing her ninth book, has two grown kids, and travels with her husband, a seminary educator.

Copyright © 1996 by the author or Christianity Today International/Today's Christian magazine (formerly Christian Reader).
Click here for reprint information.

Last Updated: October 18, 1996

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