The Times We Live In

There have always been evil men. Since the beginning of creation when Cain slew his brother Abel and watched the life seep out of him, violent men have committed violent acts, often without rhyme or reason.

Most of us never come close to the viciousness of the evil some men are capable of. We live our lives in relative safety, sheltered to a certain degree, yet once in a while something gruesome and bloody takes center stage and once again we are reminded of the times we are living in.

Try as we might to ignore the realities taking shape around us, it has become nigh to impossible not to acknowledge that our perceived safety is just an illusion. More and more, we are seeing the evil lash out, whether by randomly stabbing individuals on a college campus, gunning down innocent children in a school, or detonating bombs meant to maim and kill all within their blast radius regardless of age, gender, or nationality.

True evil, the evil that is being manifest in this country as of late is an equal opportunity destroyer. Try as it might to hide under the umbrella of religious zealotry, the face of evil is easily recognizable if we would only have the strength of character to see it for what it is, and call it by its name.

The defining paradox of our age is that we have marginalized, condescended, and trivialized the only hope we have to stem the tide of evil, believing there would be no negative effects to our abandonment of God. The further one draws from the message of Jesus, the further one gets from the truth of God’s Word, the darker and more prone to evil the heart becomes.

A society protects what it values, and the fact that so many nowadays have no qualms or resentments about taking a human life, proves we no longer value the concept of life as a people.

I fear that we’ve always thought of as isolated incidents and something out of the ordinary will become the norm as long as we continue to treat the preciousness of life with contempt and disdain.

Soon enough we will be in a perpetual state of shellshock, no longer able to process or react in an appropriate manner to the things happening around us.

We will try – as we always do – to rationalize recent events, and find another explanation for their occurrence than the one staring us in the face. We will dig in our heels as a people and harden our hearts and shake our fists and reassure ourselves that these things aren’t happening because we abandoned God, but because the world hates us for our freedom. Look around. The freedom you once had is no longer the freedom you have presently, and with each passing day we are being corralled, and forced into the mold our betters believe we ought to be.

We knew these days were coming. Jesus warned of them, Paul warned of them, even Old Testament prophets warned of them. So if these times have caught us unaware, it was not for lack of trying to warn us on God’s part. We read what Jesus said about the last days, but in the back of our minds we always think it’s talking about another time, off into the future. A time perhaps our great grandchildren will have to contend with, but certainly not us.

We’ve gotten used to all of this. We’ve grown comfortable and made a permanent residence out of what was to be a temporary stay, willfully choosing to ignore the gnawing feeling that this isn’t home try as we might to make it seem so.

The times are not changing. The times have already changed. We can sense it and feel it and see it, and no matter how much we try to pacify this constant feeling of unease, it just won’t go away.

In times such as these we either draw closer to God, or allow fear to paralyze us. We either learn to trust Him unequivocally, or we allow hopelessness to sink its claws into our hearts.

One thing is certain: indifference is no longer an option, nor is pretending we are not living in the times we are living in.

With love in Christ,
Michael Boldea Jr.