A Great Time To Be Alive

A great time to be alive?  What fool would suggest such a thing?  This fool does.  Let me tell you why I think it is a great time to be alive.

Human beings instinctively dislike change.  We prefer the familiar place, the comfortable place, clinging to its faults rather than risking the unknown that change brings.  In the church we pray that the world may be saved, but when we leave the church we try to save the world without changing it.  In America, we want to save the world if only we can save it without changing our racial prejudices, our economy, our population, or our personal comfort zones.  Indeed, we are not convinced that we are part of the world that needs to be saved—it is always that world outside of our own that we think needs saving. 

Then history (perhaps God—telling His Story and announcing God’s Dream?), tired and impatient of our lethargy, our fear, and our reluctance to alter anything, breaks in like the present terror, crying, Now you have got to change!  And when history breaks in like that, when that time comes (and it has), like it or not, it is a great time to be alive.

Air Force Academy Chapel, Colorado Springs, 1976

We are in the  midst of a revolutionary era in human history with tremendous choices facing us.  We must be a people with eyes to see possibilities in this time of travail and fear—for it is in such times in history that some of the most hopeful advances for the human race have been made.  That is what I pray for this morning—that we may have eyes to see—for if we have them, we can see the hopeful possibilities, we can make the right choices and changes,, and we can make real progress in “saving” the world.  This can be, no, IT IS for us a great time to be alive!