ONE HUNDRED CRASHING JETLINERS

My sister-in-law’s small group (in fact all the small groups at their church) will be working through the book, The Hole in Our Gospel beginning in January. I was kind of excited to hear this, as I thought it was a tremendous book! Anyway, it got me thinking and I remembered the story of the Crashing Jetliners. It’s actually come to my thoughts a few times over the past couple weeks. Are you familiar with it? If not, take a few minutes and read it.

ONE HUNDRED CRASHING JETLINERS.

"I want you to imagine for a moment that you woke up this morning to the following headline: ”One Hundred Jetliners Crash, Killing 26,500.” Think of the pandemonium this would create across the word as heads of state, parliaments and congresses convened to grapple with the nature and causes of this tragedy.

Now imagine, that the very next day, one hundred more planes crashed-and one hundred more the next, and the next, and the next. It is unimaginable that something this terrible could ever happen.

But it did – and it does. It happened today, and it happened yesterday. It will happen again tomorrow. But there was no media coverage. Yet more than 26,500 children died yesterday of preventable causes related to their poverty, and it will happen again today and tomorrow and the day after that. Almost 10 million children will be dead in the course of the year.

So why does the crash of a single plane dominate the front pages of newspapers across the world while the equivalent of one hundred planes filled with children crashing daily never reaches our ears? And even though we now have the awareness, the access and the ability to stop it, why have we chosen not to? Perhaps one reason is that these kids who are dying are not our kids; they’re somebody else’s."

--Richard Stearns – Author - “The Hole in our Gospel"

Does this make you feel uncomfortable? Because it should.