Still the same?

When I was a journalism major in the 1970’s, there was a book named How to Make $25,000 a Year Publishing Newsletters, and it planted in me the seed that someday I would publish a newsletter or magazine. (More gory details about this some other time.) Eventually I did start a magazine, and one way I promoted it was to accept speaking invitations at professional conferences to speak about marketing. 

I also worked in marketing communications for 18 years in a major regional medical center, which meant that I had to give presentations to groups from time to time.  Trust me, I have no true desire to speak to groups of people, but I have long gotten past being nervous about standing in front of and speaking to groups.  I don’t crave it, but can do it. The secret, I believe, is to truly be prepared to speak, to practice and know just what you are going to say, so I regularly practiced my presentations, even if I had delivered the same remarks many times before.

So, when our parish church put out the call a few years ago for people to be involved, I chose to help with one of the requested areas and be a lector in my Catholic church, knowing full well that we would be given workbooks with the readings for our assigned readings, and I could practice, practice, practice before I actually stood in front of other human beings to speak.

When practicing my readings for a Sunday mass in March, I repeatedly read the line from the book of Chronicles in the Old Testament of the Bible.  One part reads: “Early and often did the Lord, the God of their fathers, send his messengers to them, for he had compassion on his people…. But they mocked the messengers of God, despised his warnings, and scoffed at his prophets.”

It was a sad and sobering revelation, one that dashed a lot of hope for me.  This reading was from thousands of years ago, and it was lamenting the fact that many people don’t heed the warnings we are given, that we think we can do whatever we want to do and that there are never any consequences, unless perhaps, maybe, only if we are unlucky enough to get caught.

There are times when I think, and probably when you think as well, that the world is going to hell, especially easy to think if you just look at the almost weekly occurrences of people doing mass shootings of innocent people. I just don’t understand it.

Is that really it?  There is no true right or wrong, there is only getting away with it in this life or not?  Are we truly no more advanced than we were as a race thousands of years ago, and that so many still scoff at messengers?