A Heart for the City
We hear it on the nightly news. We read about it on our CNN app on the go. We turn on the radio and we get the spiel again. Our city is in trouble. Crime is rampant. Men kill their brothers. Moms leave their kids. Husbands abuse their wives. Drug dealers get richer and richer while our young people get trapped in drugs and its commerce.
Things are so bad we just want to stay home! We go to work, do some errands, get our entertainment in and yes, we go to church on Sunday. When prayer is offered up for the city during Sunday service, sound bytes of negative media replay furiously in our minds. We pray, but we don’t want to… after all, “they’re ‘bad people’. They are getting what they deserve. Instead of being here at church, they’re out there selling drugs, getting drunk and killing each other. It’s Sodom and Gomorrah out there!”
But just when we don’t care anymore, Sodom and Gomorrah come knocking at our door. That is just what happened to Abraham in Genesis 14. He was minding his own business and looking after his vast wealth when trouble in Sodom hit home for him:
‘The four kings captured all the possessions of Sodom and Gomorrah, all their food and equipment, and went on their way. They captured Lot, Abram’s nephew who was living in Sodom at the time, taking everything he owned with them. A fugitive came and reported to Abram the Hebrew.’ (Genesis 14:11-13, MSG)
The invaders had taken all of Sodom’s goods, food and most importantly something that really mattered to Abraham—his only nephew.
Without hesitating, Abraham took the 318 fighting men he had trained for war and went out to save Lot. The story has a great ending. Abraham recovers all the stolen goods and brings Lot home. But that’s not all. He also rescues the ‘women and the other people’ (Genesis 14:16) taken captive by the four kings. Those ‘other people’ were somebody’s nephews, nieces, brothers, sisters, and wives! From a distance, they were just like the people in our city—statistics on the news. In the tar pits and the valley, alongside Abraham’s nephew, they were terrified souls about to die at the hands of a foreign enemy. Abraham needed to see that for himself. And quite frankly, so do we.
We need, we must see our city for what it really is—a large group of people in need of God’s love. If you don’t see that, maybe it is because you’ve been in your church cocoon for too long. Get out of your church’s four walls for a while. Feel the palpable pain on Central Avenue. Hear the sound of emptiness at Uptown. See the struggle for survival in the South Valley. Use all the weapons of your warfare and fight for your own as well as for everyone else’s son and daughter. Get a heart for Albuquerque. Get a heart for your city.
