On New Year’s Eve Seth Godin cited an article by a man named Max Rosen that posited, “The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better. All three statements are true at the same time.”
It is fairly easy to see on a macro level. Imagine what life was like in 1925, and now 1825, and now 1725, and next 1525, and then 25 A.D. What once was awful is much better 100 years later, over and over, but there was/is always a long way to go.
It’s harder to see day by day, but still … A demented human drives a pickup truck into a crowd on New Year’s morning: The world is awful. Billions of people celebrated the new year peacefully and joyfully: The world is better. A handful of people around the world celebrated the disgraceful horror in New Orleans as if it was a victory against the great Satan: The world can be much better.
When I turned the page to what would become my first journal entry of the new year, the Bible verse on the page was a familiar one from Galatians: “But the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such things there is no law.”
Sometimes when something awful happens, it’s easy to believe the fruit of the spirit is nowhere to be seen. But it becomes easier to spot day by day, and people keep finding and adopting Paul’s words as their own — and so the world is much better than it was, even though it can still be much better.
How can we make our worlds better today? It’s a constant challenge.
