"Numbers......................"

On April 30th, 1991, on that one day, 138,000 people drowned in Bangladesh. At dinner I mentioned to our daughter, who was then seven years old, that it was hard to imagine 138,000 people drowning. “No, it’s easy”, she said; “Lots and lots of dots, in blue water.”

Every year sixty million people die; of these, half are children under five. Every 110 hours a million more humans arrive on the planet than die into the planet. Of every seventy-five babies born today in the United States, one will die in a car crash…

There are 1,198,500,000 people alive now in China. To get a feel for what this means, simply take yourself, in all your singularity, importance, complexity, and love, and multiply by 1,198,500,000. See? Nothing to it.…

Was it wisdom Mao Tse-Tung attained when, like Ted Bundy, the serial killer who defended himself by asking “What’s the big deal? I mean, there are so many people!”, he awakened to the long view? “China has many people”, he told Nehru in 1954. “The atom bomb is nothing to be afraid of. The death of ten or twenty million is nothing to be afraid of.” A witness said Nehru showed shock. Later, in speaking in Moscow, Mao displayed yet more generosity, boasting that he was “willing to lose 300 million people”, then, in1957, half of China’s population. Then, again, Stalin also had the opinion that “One death is a tragedy; a million deaths are just a statistic.”…

. Los Angeles airport has 25,000 parking spaces. This is about one space for every person who died in 1985 in Columbia when a volcano erupted. This is one space for two years’ worth of accidental killings from land mines left over from recent wars. At five to a car, almost all the Inuit in the world could park at LAX. Similarly, if you propped up or stacked four bodies to a car, you could fit into the airport all the corpses from the firestorm bombing of Tokyo in March, 1945, or all the world’s dead from two atomic bombs, or the corpses of Londoners who died in the plague, the corpses of Burundians killed in civil war since 1993. You could not fit America’s homeless there, however, even at eighteen or nineteen to a car…

The question to ponder, however, is who has God put on your heart today?......... (The question mine, but the numbers from Annie Dillard in “For the Time Being”)

My youngest daughter and three of our grandchildren returned from youth camp last night. It’s been a week of continual reports concerning “tears and tongues”, deep prayer encounters taking place at that huge altar area the gymnasium sanctuary there in Barbourville. I am grateful; but, in truth, it is an annual pilgrimage for our church and the “dip in the pool”, the immersion into God’s presence must now come home to face the world. If the well isn’t maintained through frequent visitation, if the baptized aren’t taught “Christ in me” in so far as handling “me in me”, the experience tends to fade as tomorrow meets you day after day. Life isn’t easy. In the Bible, Jacob, while fleeing from his brother’s wrath, dreams of angels ascending and descending a heavenly ladder. When he awakes, a conditional vow is made born out of his statement that “Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not!” Twenty-one years later, already blessed beyond measure, just before reuniting with Esau, he wrestles with God and demands audible, oral confirmation of the Creator’s hand upon him, their relationship evidently still not “written in cement”, at least as far as he’s concerned; and when I read of him eventually returning to Bethel, by divine command, stopping on the way to hide idols that he permitted his household to entertain, it gives me pause about any real commitment to that oath made there in the beginning. Surely it has always been a “stumble down the path”. His experience, there with but a stone for a pillow, his relationship realized through an external connection, differs from ours in the sense of the “hook-up”, through Calvary’s Cross, now positioned within those who believe. Humanity, however, remains humanity. Maybe that’s what we need to teach more, instead of all this theology suggesting we have the Almighty locked up in a box? How many do we have to lose in battle, having armed them with little more than ecclesiastical toothpicks?......