Get your hands dirty, the way Jesus dirtied his hands for you
Johnnie Moore’s Dirty God is a book every young adult you know should read — and more than a few of us not-so-young adults too.
An excerpt:
When you think about slavery or sex trafficking in these terms, it causes your stomach to turn over, and in the heart of someone motivated by grace, it should produce a compelling drive to do something about it.
Imagine, for instance, that same adorable eight-year-old niece went with her parents for a summer trip through Europe’s most glorious cities. She’s having the time of her life looking at the Duomo in the heart of Italy’s Renaissance city of Florence. She and her parents are looking straight up at the stunning architecture, observing the size and curvature of the building, the ancient decoration inscribed on its exterior, and how the folksy, old-world piazza hems the Duomo in. They feel that they’ve moved back in time to a simpler, more mythical era.
Just then her parents look down. Their daughter is nowhere in sight. They immediately snap into panic mode. Their pulses race, their eyes dart frantically in every direction, they call out her name, and then they scream it.
“Where are you? Where are you?”
By the time they’re done frantically searching the growing crowd, after they have called upon the help of the local authorities, they suspect that their precious daughter is already in another place. What they don’t know is that she’s already in another city altogether, kidnapped by horrible people who intend to sell her to the highest bidder so he can act out his most satanic fantasies.
Imagine that that had been your fate, or the fate of your wife or sister or mother or best friend or the person you’re closest to. How would that make you feel? Does it not cause you to shudder?
We tend to shut out this kind of suffering, deny it, or put it out of our minds because there’s nothing we can do about it, so we might as well not even think about it. These scenarios are definitely downers, it’s true—but nevertheless, they ought to make our blood boil and our eyes tear up.
We should be more affected than we are by these things. And when we reach the appropriate level of outrage, we’ll actually do something about it—we’ll stand in the gap for those who need us the most, and get our hands dirty the way Jesus dirtied his hands for us.
Visit Johnnie’s site by clicking here.
Johnnie Moore is a 29-year-old vice president at Liberty University whose humanitarian whose work has taken him to more than two-dozen nations.
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