What is the right question to be asking these days, especially about the problem of our brokenness and hostility, our anger and relentless polarization? About our inability to live as if we are made in God’s image and treat each other accordingly?

On Wednesday this week, I made a driving mistake in the North Grand mall parking lot, and within 2 seconds the other driver shouted out his window, “You a---hole!!!” I didn’t even get a chance to apologize.

It’s on our streets; it’s in our homes; it’s in our hearts.. It’s in our politics, in our government, in our education, even in our churches. In us!

We want (we say) it to stop. We often think that more protesting, more press conferences, more laws, more calling out the others to shame them into agreeing and changing, more personal and national trying harder to have the right attitudes and act more righteously and justly—all of that and more is the solution. Let’s just demand even more forcefully that we all try harder.

Somehow, some way we just want all the wrongness to stop and all the rightness simply to kick in. And yet Bono I think is correct. We think we have the answers, but it may be the question we have wrong. So if I may, let me risk being thought a complete idiot and ask you what I think is the first right question. Here it is: Are you alive today?

Sure, I’ll repeat it. Are you alive today? You might be thinking, “What kind of question is
that?” Of course I’m alive. I’m sitting here, listening to you. I’m breathing. In a few minutes, God willing I’ll walk out of here and get on with what’s next in my life. Why are you asking me if I’ve alive?”

Well, I’m asking you about this because when it comes to identifying a solution to the messes, the key question for anyone is whether or not they are alive. Truth be told, vast majority of people in our world trying to solve the problem are not. Not alive. Not really. Not actually. Not truly alive.

Here’s the truth—we cannot begin to solve the problem of our broken, self-centered mistreatment of one another without being truly alive. And if, on our own and in our natural state, we are not alive,” then a 2nd question becomes even more important. Since we, on our own, are not truly alive, then Has God done anything about the death that dominates all human beings?