Dear Christians of America: We Could Change Things

Dear Christians of America,

Our country is a mess. I googled it.

I wanted to find out the magnitude of the madness, so I typed my questions into the search box. And here is what I found:

I found out 117 people take their own lives in the United States every day. (https://afsp.org/about-suicide/suicide-statistics/) That's 42,705 deaths by suicide annually.

I found out that there are 60,000 slaves in our nation where slavery was supposedly abolished. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/10/17/this-map-shows-where-the-worlds-30-million-slaves-live-there-are-60000-in-the-u-s/)

I found out that 85,000 refugees entered the country during the fiscal year of 2016 and almost half of those were Muslims. (http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/10/05/u-s-admits-record-number-of-muslim-refugees-in-2016/)

I found out that there are 400,000 orphans (http://www.relevantmagazine.com/reject-apathy/loss-innocents/american-orphan-crisis), and that there have been 942,102 abortions in the U.S. this year alone. (http://www.numberofabortions.com/)

I found out that there are 13,600,000 widows in the country (http://www.widowshope.org/first-steps/these-are-the-statistics/) and 12,000,000 single parent homes (https://singlemotherguide.com/single-mother-statistics/). There are more than 500,000 homeless (http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN0T908720151120) and 45,000,000 living in poverty (http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/5828974). There are 876,000 divorces annually (https://www.mckinleyirvin.com/Family-Law-Blog/2012/October/32-Shocking-Divorce-Statistics.aspx) and the LGBT community swells to approximately 9 million strong (http://gaylife.about.com/od/comingout/a/population.htm).

Meanwhile, my friend turned on the news. "I'm not big on horror movies," he texted me. "But these news channels are really interesting." Everywhere, protestors flood the streets and beat desperate fists on closed doors, begging authorities to change things.

Dear Christians of America...we could change things.

No, really--we could change things.

I typed in one more question to the search box: "How many professing Christians in the United States?"

About 70% of the United States population identifies as Christian (http://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/). If the population equals 324,720,797, like Wikipedia says it does, then some quick calculations lead us to...

Nearly 230 million professing Christians in the United States.

That's about 5300 of us for every one suicide.

About 3800 of us for every one slave.

2700 for every refugee, and 460 for every homeless person.

575 for every orphan.

262 for every divorce, and 25 for every LGBT.

245 for every abortion.

16 for every widow, 19 for every single-parent home, and 5 for every impoverished person. The numbers describing every problem our country faces...are smaller than the number called to solve them.

Quite literally, Christ--and His body, the Church--is bigger than all of our problems. We could change things.

But to change things, we have to act.

I am at a loss for how to tackle all these problems. Many others are far more qualified than I am to inform you about steps you can take, and I will endeavor to become more qualified. For today, though, here are the practical actions I can think of:

Read your Bible and pray--every.single.day. We cannot share God's heart if we don't know it, and the best way to know it is to talk to Him and be in His Word.

Educate yourself. Do the research. Find out the problems in your town, where you can have an affect, and learn how you can help.

Love people and build relationships. One of the best ways to prevent suicide is to talk to a suicidal person about why they want to kill themselves. LGBTs seek open hearts and open minds. Slaves, orphans, widows, struggling marriages, the poor--all need safe places to land. People who love and listen become those safe places.

Get involved. Adopt. Open your homes to the homeless and the refugees. Give to the poor. Assist widows and single parents. Join organizations that rescue slaves.

And remember the gospel. God was about all this stuff long before we were. Jesus spent all of His days seeking out the least of these.

Seeking out us.

Dear Christians of America...you were bought at a price. Let us follow in the footsteps of our Savior, who was not afraid to sacrifice His entire life to save the mess that is our world.