Romans 13:2 “Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.”
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.John F. Kennedy
Community is not just a “buzz word” of our day, it’s how God designed us to live, “in community.” Now there are different spheres of community. There are your family and neighborhood. There are your work and school. God did not design us to go through life isolated – we were designed for community.
We tend to be rugged individualists, but when tragedy strikes, universally we all cling to something or someone. But the drift to individualism is strong, so very quickly we go back to ourselves and we have to fight the tendency. That’s the power of a relationship with God and a significant relationship with a community of Faith.
Think about it, you’d think when tragedy strikes people would be there, they are for a while, and many for a long while, but all too often, people drift away and it takes another tragedy to bring us back to that place of commitment to God and to others.
Terminal disease does that. You’d think people would just be there, but the reality is that many don’t know what to do or say, so they do nothing. They avoid even friends.
Every family is unique. You can’t fix the situation, but you can be there and the longer you’re there the more apparent it becomes what their unique thumbprint is and you can speak to that and bring comfort. You can work on your own relationship with God and family and friends.
We had a terrible event happen in our community. A police officer was killed in the line of duty. His wife wrote an open letter to the community a few weeks after his death. She said being in a community doesn’t mean everybody looks the same and thinks the same. Disagreement is part of every community, but at the heart of it all is peace and respect. At the end she said, hug your family.