What’s the worst thing you can imagine ever happening?

All you know and hold dear swept away in a flood or reduced to ashes in a fire? The loss of a child or sibling?
Channel that emotion for a moment as you read or hear the news of a catastrophic event in the life of someone in a distant city. Or the next town over. Maybe even someone you know and work with.

We’re not even halfway through the year 2022, and we’ve already seen and heard so many painful stories of death, loss and destruction it’s become difficult to remember them all — the wave never seems to subside.
Even locally, we’ve seen violence erupt as one man has the audacity to use a gun to kill another man in midday traffic at one of the busiest intersections in town.

We struggle uncomfortably with how to provide aid to one nation invaded by another while the next state over is reeling from a series of tornadoes.
Then our attention is drawn to the devasting loss of life in a shooting in a suburban school.

We search for something to pin the blame on; Second Amendment advocates scream, “arm the teachers,” while the teachers say, “more police.” The police point to mental health, while the psychology community is helpless in admitting they can only treat those who come.

All the while, our communities and their governments standoff over whether life begins inside or outside the womb.
We want answers. We want something better for ourselves and those who come after us.

One problem is that, in all the turmoil, we have lost sight of the question: “Who Am I?”
In the first verses of the first chapter of the first book of the Bible, God steps out into the vast nothingness that existed. With his big, booming God-voice, he said, “Let there be light!” and there was. Then the earth, water, land, animals of every kind, and finally, his crowning creation: man. Conferring with his ethereal partners, they chose to make man — male and female — in their image. Beings that work together to create, think, reason and love. And somewhere along the way to today, we have all but completely lost sight of that.

We have forgotten who we are. We have forgotten whose we are. We have devised ways to destroy, manipulate, control and even to wear our hatred for others, the God who created us, as if it were a crown of our own glory.

And as we look for answers to the evil and deconstruction of all we know to be good and right, let’s look at who we are. Or at least who we were made to be and how we were designed.
We know the symptoms all too well. Now it’s time to open the manufacturer’s manual, see how we were designed to function, and begin restoring ourselves to our original condition. We were made for more.