Making Life Work

By: Ronald L. Dart

The precious sons of Zion, comparable to fine gold, how are they esteemed as earthen pitchers, the work of the hands of the potter! Even the sea monsters draw out the breast, they nurse their young ones: the daughter of my people is become cruel, like the ostriches in the wilderness (Lamentations 4:1-3).

    The high school graduating class of ‘94 was decimated by a terrible plague and no one paid it much mind. If a bus load of them had been killed on the way to a game, it would have made headlines–at least locally. If a school had blown up and killed a few hundred of them it would have made national, even worldwide, news.

By: Ronald L. Dart

    He is twenty years old, but he looks more like sixteen. In blue jeans and sweater, his hair neatly cut, he looks like he should have books under his arm and be headed for class. The district attorney says he is a cold-blooded killer. It seems he held up a convenience store late one night. The clerk offered no resistance and gave him all the money in the cash register. But as he scooped up the money and stuffed it into his pockets, this “student” calmly raised his pistol and shot the clerk squarely between the eyes just to leave no witnesses. Now the district attorney wants you, the jury, to find him guilty and sentence him to death.

    When Jeremiah walked the streets of Jerusalem after the city had fallen, he wrote with a sad heart about a broken country. He was old but when he had first begun to preach, he was so young he considered himself a mere child. Over the generations, he warned about what was coming. He had been reviled, hated, rejected, thrown in jail, tossed into a dungeon, and left to die. Rescued through the back door, he was in prison until the city fell.

    But now, freed by the Babylonians, he walked the streets and thought about what he had seen and heard. For a long time, as he preached, he had assumed that repentance was possible. But now, as he considered the tragedy of Jerusalem, he had to wonder if the die had been cast long before he first began to preach as a very young man. Now, on this day, it seemed that everything he had preached had been in vain, and there had been no hope from the outset. So why had he been commissioned in the first place?