She meant it to be cute, I’m sure.
There were photos of her kids in their backpacks on the first day of school.
And the kids were cute - it was her sentiments that weren’t.
The first hashtag featured the name of the school, a private school, she wanted us all to know.
The second hashtag was this - #allisrightinourworld
I can’t wrap my head around it. I can’t make sense of it - I keep turning those words over again and again and they are dissonant. They are incongruent. They are insane.
All is right in our world - would anyone (else) agree with that?
I try emphasizing different words -
All is right in our world.
All is right in our world.
All is right in our world.
All is right in our world.
When you watch the news, read your Twitter feed, walk out your front door, one thing is abundantly clear - all is NOT right in our world.
I think, if I had to guess, she would read her hashtag with the third emphasis. Our world, my world, is good. All is right here and now for me.
What about El Paso?
What about Dayton?
What about Hong Kong?
What about Syria, Iran, Iraq?
What about all of the pain that is throbbing in our world, our country, our state, our city, our neighborhood?
All is not right.
And that sentiment, that hashtag on a photo of two kids headed to private school in an upper class area of a metropolitan city in a country where freedom is so abundant it is cheap…that sentiment is part of the problem.
Jesus said if you want to love Him, you have to love your neighbor.
And He knew it - that insidious desire to define neighbor on our own terms, as one who lives within my boundaries, a fellow resident of my world - so He clarified it.
Neighbors are anyone who live in His world who experience need.