V-Tech, PBA & Norco

This year has placed me in positions where I’ve felt more vulnerable than ever before – between traffic insanities, diseases I can’t even pronounce carried by bugs of all shapes and sizes, political instability and loud protests, questionable standards or transportation, villages where people have been arrested and/or martyred for their faith – recently, and a passport from a country now known as a target. We’ve been in places where it wouldn’t be all that surprising to have something devastating happen, something even fatal – because it has, and it just so happens that it wasn’t to us. I’m not going to pretend it’s been easy to be in those situations because the spirit of fear takes possibilities and makes the thought of them nearly paralyzing were it not for the One who is stronger than fear. But a classroom on a Virginia Campus is what we see has claimed the lives of over 30 people? This is crazy-making. A classroom never ranked on my most-vulnerable list.

The U.S. Supreme Court just surprised a lot of Americans by maintaining a ban on a procedure that surprises most of the world. I remember sitting with several international friends when partial-birth abortion was being debated in the Supreme Court back in 2000. “Barbaric” was the term they used – most of them from ‘liberal’ countries, all working in human rights and thinking the U.S. has no right pointing fingers at other human rights abuses while we continue to allow such procedures. How an article can in the same paragraph describe the procedure of crushing a fetus’ head and articulate that it could be considered anything less than murder honestly baffles me.

Last night we were watching a movie called “Rapid Fire”, based on a bank robbery that turned into the most violent battle of U.S. Law Enforcement history. It took place in Norco. Here we are sitting in Asia, reflecting on weeks and months of vulnerability that the Father has taken us through, and the movie we’re watching of such desperate and purposeless violence is taking place in NORCO.

In just over a month we return to our indigenous roots. I had a dream the other night – I was going to a play, one where I had a role but hadn’t learned my lines or remembered my cues from my Acting Coach. Countries all around this world are hurting, and ours is not an exception. The evil and desperation that would lead a 23-year old to shoot people because he was teased by rich brats … the disconnection from logic in debating the killing of a living fetus … the violence brought on by a drive for nothing more than money. This is the set stage for the roles we all have to play. What are our lines? What are our cues? What has our Acting Coach been teaching us that we need to put into practice?