There's Hope For TodaySample

The girl caught my attention as she weaved her way along the sidewalk. She paused for a moment, hollow-eyed, twenty-something, emaciated. I held her gaze for a second, and then her eyes shifted as she took two faltering steps. Her lips moved soundlessly. The light turned and I shot across the intersection toward the safety of the middle classes. Conversation swirled around me, but I couldn’t hear a word.

All senses were arrested by a voice that whispered somewhere in the back of my mind ... “She’s somebody’s little girl! She’s the hope child turned hopeless! She’s a shattered mother’s dream – a walking corpse on a Florida sidewalk.”

She is one in millions – uniquely created by God and lost in a zombie world that rarely collides with mine. I’ve heard it said that America is “over-evangelized,” but I don’t believe it. They surround us – the lost, the lonely, the losers, the least, the last. They confound us – addicts, drifters, abandoned, molested. They repulse us – yes they do – and that truth should break our hearts and blind our eyes with tears.

It’s no wonder Jesus is absent from our fine cathedrals and plush sanctuaries. We’ve forgotten the “least of these,” and we’ve left Him in the streets.