Blue Like Jazz & bomb threats

I'm home from MSU for the summer. So far I've been enjoying getting caught up on sleep, and I've been slowly unpacking all my things, which is quite a large project in itself. It's quite the adjustment... to go from a completely full schedule to a schedule that doesn't entail much. My days are pretty empty, and so I've been able to sit back and watch the things going on in my household. All my siblings have their own routine. Steph's wrapping up all her senior stuff, preparing her speach for graduation and doing AP testing. Andrew just finished drumline, and he's getting ready to start the new season. He's enjoying his video games a lot. Katie just made the varsity pom team for next year, and she's finishing up middle school, and starting a new chapter in her life very soon. Everyone's so busy and has their own schedules... it's amusing to watch sometimes. I'm thankful I have Mickey here. I think he missed me a lot. All he's been doing is following me around these last four days or so. He won't leave my side.

In the last two days between the middle school and the high school, there have been bomb threats at each school. This just isn't normal. We live in Farmington Hills suburbia. Things like this don't just happen every day. In all my years in school here, we've never had a bomb threat.

And it hit me. It hit me that this is just a small example of what the world is like. It doesn't matter if the threats were a joke, or if the threats were serious. They were still threats. And the kids who made the threats are like the rest of the world... it's acceptable, or okay to do these kinds of things... to make threats - threats that affect lives. The fact of the matter is that this world is broken. The human race is broken. It's been broken for over 2,000 years. It's always been broken, and it always will be broken. This world needs Jesus. This world needs to know that there is someone who can fix all of these things, if they would just open up their eyes and allow Him to love them. We need to do something about it. It breaks my heart that people - kids think it's okay to go about making threats like this... treating the lives of those around them as if they didn't matter.

It was like a bacteria or a cancer or a trance. It wasn't on the skin; it was in the soul. It showed itself in loneliness, lust, anger, jealously, and depression. It had people screwed up bad everywhere you went--at the store, at home, at church; it was ugly and deep. Lots of singers on the radio were singing about it, and cops had jobs because of it. It was as if we were broken, I thought, as if we were never supposed to feel these sticky emotions. It was as if we were cracked, couldn't love right, couldn't feel good things for very long without screwing it all up. We were like gasoline engines running on diesel. From a very early age our souls are taught there is a comfort and a dscomfort in the world, a good and bad if you will, a lovely and frightening.There seemed to me to be too much frightening, and I don't know why it existed.
-Donald Miller; Blue Like Jazz

It's our duty to make a difference. We need to reach the lost. We need to do our Father's work. We need to let our Loving Father work through us to reach the broken. Let's get the job done.

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 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. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.
-Matthew 28:18-20