Seeing Our New World



We’d met at the park, so her kids could play. From a nearby bench we could keep an eye on all the action while talking about motherhood, marriage, her full-time job, and marvel that sanity was still possible.

Janet pulled a news magazine from her bag. She flipped it open to a page revealing the photographic journalism we’ve come to expect but never can un-see. I looked at the bloody image of a dead boy—carried by a woman bearing the weight of far more than her brutalized child. I cringed.

“Julie saw this.” Janet shook her head as she quickly slipped the magazine back into her bag. “She asked me what had happened. What do you tell a seven-year-old about people who kill children?”





I thought back to when my kids were young and we’d sing, It’s A Small World After All. We learned about far away places and cultures, but even with different languages, clothes, and homes, people were still people—with a purpose and passion to live. 

Our kids used to have a childhood and then learn about the problems as they grew older.








But today is a new world. How do you explain why someone would behead a child or why a nine-year-old girl should be a sex slave? 

When the history books are written about the 21st Century will it be noted how some nations turned back the centuries and became barbaric slave traders again? 


Back when Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir led her nation, she famously said, “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.”

Evil is all about hate.

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, I recall my grandma’s wisdom: we can’t always understand evil, but we can do one thing to solve it: Love. Then she quoted from the Bible: “Do not let evil defeat you; instead, conquer evil with good.” Romans 12:21

Even though our kids see the evil, we can teach them to use goodness to defeat it. Teaching goodness in an increasingly evil world? It's the best weapon we have.


Preemptive Love offers help to the hurting we see.

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