Just Thinking

I have come across this article and thought it might interest some readers.

Ravi Zacharias International Ministries - Just Thinking Dying Beliefs and Still Born Hopes
Ravi Zacharias 1996 - Winter

This article is excerpted from a chapter in Ravi' s book, Deliver Us From Evil.
Truth is stranger than fiction, it is said, but as Chesterton has appropriately declared, that may well be because we have made fiction to suit ourselves. There is possibly a more disturbing reason for our estrangement from truth, particularly if that truth signifies a reality that is terrifying and unchangeable. Our inability to alter what is actual frustrates our grandiose delusions of being sovereign over everything. And that may be at the heart of why we find truth to be so strange. Remorse-filled situations that are irreversible offer no relief to the one seeking escape from them, because any hope that it was all a dream, or that it is all erasable by merely wishing the opposite, dissipates in the face of a stern concrete certainty.

A heartrending story of such dimensions was shared with me by a friend some years ago--the truth of which seemed much stranger than fiction. To do full justice to the poignancy of the incident necessitates the description of the very surroundings that occasioned my being privy to it. We were sitting in the parking lot of a historic building, an edifice symbolic of the gathering of the gatekeepers of society. There was an air of sophistication about all who entered. I was preoccupied with the theme of an address I was to deliver on the problem of emptiness that stalks our younger generation, growing up in a time of such moral confusion. Just then, the arrival of a rather prominent individual prompted my host, a minister, to recount the story in very somber tones.

"There goes our federal prosecutor," he said, "a fine man whom I met under very tragic circumstances." As he labored through the details in recounting their first contact, I knew this was not just another crisis in a minister's routine, but an ineradicable scar on his pastoral heart.

He told me of a young couple he had married some years ago, who had represented to him every ideal worth emulating. They were the mascot of excellence held up before the youth of the church. Both were in preparation for the practice of medicine, and were on sizable scholarships of merit. As he had driven away after performing their wedding ceremony, he had rehearsed in his own mind what a grand occasion it had been, and that in all his years of ministry he had not seen a more radiant couple. He thrilled at the prospect of all that lay ahead of them.

But then like a shattered dream, only a few months into the marriage there was a dreadful awakening...

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Ravi Zacharias International
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