Puzzled

These quiet mornings alone in a hotel room while Al is teaching his class are good times for reading and reflecting and pondering.  Good times to think about some of the things going on in the world and about a lot of the things I just don't understand.

In that last category, I have to put the uproar about the death of a lion named Cecil.  Admittedly, I have not followed this story as closely as some.  But as I listened to the outrage on a newscast I watched this morning, I was bewildered.  Seriously, to call for extradition and criminal charges against a hunter, who as far as I am aware, followed the rules for the hunt, seems a bit much.  And the charges would not be because he violated the rules for hunting, but that he went hunting in the first place and dared to shoot a lion.

The level of outrage over this lion astonishes me.  Where is the outrage over the sale of pre-born baby parts by Planned Parenthood?  Or for that matter, where is the outrage over the murder of millions of pre-born babies?  To value the life of one lion more than the lives of millions of babies is something I can't understand.

The entire scenario puzzles me even more when I read quotes like this one (from The Conservative Tribune): 

But most people in Zimbabwe don’t care about the dead lion, as they have much greater problems to deal with, such as an 80 percent unemployment rate, insane monetary inflation and a hugely corrupt government. “Are you saying that all this noise is about a dead lion? Lions are killed all the time in this country,” said Tryphina Kaseke, a used-clothes hawker on the streets of Harare. “What is so special about this one?”

I'm puzzled about the uproar about a lion.  And I was even more puzzled when I heard this morning that the quarterback of the Seattle Seahawks was given an $87,000,000 contract extension.  Eighty-seven million dollars to play a game.  Even more bizarre than that, there were fans here in Seattle taking up a collection to pay him, just in case the owners of the team didn't come up with a suitable contract!

I saw a news report this morning of two mothers who were arrested after having left their children locked in a car while they went in to do some shopping.  What kind of parent would leave their child in a locked, hot car? 

Has the entire world lost all its common sense?  These stories, and many more like them, leave me scratching my head.

I'm puzzled by it all.  Yet not really.  After all, we are told in Scripture that in the last days, difficult times will come.  And these are, indeed, difficult times. 

The clock is ticking.


"In the last days, difficult times will come.  For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self-control, brutal, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, holding to a form of godliness, although they have denied its power.  Avoid such men as these."  (2 Timothy 3:1-5 NASB)

"It is already the hour for you to awaken from sleep; for now salvation is nearer to us than when we first believed."  (Romans 13:11 NASB)