Keeping up with current events now-a-days can be quite exhausting and emotionally distressing. Bad news has become the norm while good news is hardly reported. Countless shootings, terror attacks and other acts of violence can have you believing that strangers can't be trusted, good Samaritans don't exist and people are just too different for division to ever end. There were days when I, too, believed that the world was on a downward spiral.
July 8, 2016, was not one of those days.
I invited one of my best friends from university to a lake party with about 25 of my friends from home. My friends from home are an extremely close-knit group because we went to high school together and grew up in the same youth group. Naturally, I was a pretty apprehensive about how my college best friend would fit in with them, but everyone seemed to love him! After the last basketball game of the day, the guys decided to jump back in the lake for the last time. Five minutes later, my college best friend was unconscious from electrocution, another friend was unconscious from an attempt to save him and the rest of us were in a frenzy of prayer and keeping them alive until the ambulance arrived.
I could go into detail about the accident. I could write paragraphs about how traumatizing it was watching two people who mean the world to me dragged out of the water. I could go on and on and on, but I won't. This day was not a day of tragedy, but a day of triumph. They might not have been strangers to me, but to my best friend, 25 strangers saved his life the first day they met him. Whether they actually pulled him out of the water, called 9-1-1, directed the ambulances from the driveway to our location on the property, or prayed relentlessly, every person played a vital role in keeping him alive.
Our response to this accident was a true testament to the strength found when united as one body in Christ. St. Paul in his letter to the Corinthians writes,
" God has so constructed the body as to give greater honor to a part that is without it, so that there may be no division in the body, but that the parts may have the same concern for one another. If one part suffers, all the parts suffer with it; if one part is honored, all parts share its joy." [1 Corinthians 12: 24-26]
In all honesty, if my friends did not see my college best friend as part of the same Body of Christ, I'm not sure he would still be here. People these days are so closed off to others, and it isn't uncommon to find people who only look out for "their own kind" or "their clique." It's sad how rare it is to find a culture of inclusion among millennials. I don't think my friends would have stayed in the emergency room until 1:00 a.m. praying with me if they didn't see my college best friend as their brother in Christ despite knowing him for a few hours. The bond we share as children of God runs deeper than the bonds of race, social class, nationalism, etc. We may be different people with distinct talents and characteristics, but we can utilize our distinctions as one body to create God's Kingdom here on earth. If the world truly longs to experience the restoration of peace, we need to start seeing past the divisions we as corrupt humans have created and return to the image God originally painted for humanity -- an image of one family acting with mercy, concern, and love for one another.
