an uncomfortable post

I've been thinking (a dangerous pasttime, I know).

Since when did it become popular to refer to our circumstances as "my world." Like, "My wife and 2.2 kids are my world." When did it become praiseworthy to claim a world so small?

It doesn't do us much credit if "our world" is limited to people who it is natural for us to love.

My heart has adopted an unnatural ache for a people who are perhaps amongst the world's most forgotten. They are people we think of in terms of nuclear weapons.

Frosty Cold War-era diplomacy.

Hatred of, well, pretty much everyone who isn't them. (If you don't know who I'm talking about, google what nation is rated as the world's worst persecutor of Christians. It'll all come together then.)

They've got concentration camps that hold thousands—and those outside the barbed wire don't generally have much brighter conditions.

Every country has parentless children. But their orphans line up in orphanages like men line up in our death row. Except even our death row prisoners get to eat regularly.
Then there are house church members lined up in front of their own neighbors and shot to death.

And somehow, they've still got heroes who have the courage to defy it all. By praying. By hoping. By worshipping God, not the state.

I'm not saying this because I like pain or like talking about it. As a kid, Mom read aloud Christian persecution stories. I don't recall ever feeling more uncomfortable in my life than huddling on the couch, hearing about children killed in Sudan or Iran. I haven't changed a ton—I still hate hearing such painful news.

But there's a difference between hating painful news cause it makes you uncomfortable, and hating painful news because you hate that people loved by God are suffering.

Frederich Buechner wrote: "Compassion is the sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else's skin."

John Stott said, "We must be global Christians with a global vision because our God is a global God."

And I guess all I'm wondering is what would happen if we saw the world as it is, and didn't reduce it just to us and our lives.

I'm praying that God would give us wide, wide hearts for the world's pain and bodies that are willing to jump headtotoe into God's desire for the nations.

At the very least, the lovers of Jesus in the most hurting nations would know they aren't forgotten.