Thursday, May 2, 2019

A BLIND ANIMOSITY

"If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated Me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you."  (John 15:18-19 NIV)

A short story by the Spanish writer Carmen Corde tells of a young woman who gives birth to a blind son.  "I do not want my child to know that he is blind!" she informs family and neighbors, forbidding anyone to use telltale words such as "light," "color," and "sight."  The boy grows up unaware of his disability until one day a strange girl jumps over the fence of the garden and spoils everything by using all the forbidden words.  His world shatters in the face of this unimagined new reality.

In modern times, Christians resemble the strange girl who brings a message from the outside.  To a skeptical audience they bring rumors of another world beyond the fence, of an afterlife beyond death, of a loving God who is somehow working out His will in the chaotic history of this planet.  As in Carmen Corde's story, the news may not be welcome.  "We forget that what is to us an extension of sight is to the rest of the world a peculiar and arrogant blindness," the Catholic novelist Flannery O'Connor admitted.

-- Philip Yancey in “Rumors of Another World”


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