Predictions

This is the time of year for those who deceive the gullible with claims of psychic power to do their thing: predicting what will happen in 2013. I thought I would do a little prognostication for 2013. I guarantee these predictions to be more accurate than any you will read in the tabloids on the supermarket checkout stands.

Sightings of space aliens and Elvis — perhaps together — will continue to be reported in the tabloids. But seriously...

Starvation will continue to plague Africa — if not in Somalia, then somewhere else on that vast continent. As long as hunger for power is the controlling dynamic in some peoples’ lives, their fellow-citizens’ hunger for food will be insufficient reason for the powerful to stifle their madness.

AIDS will persist as a major public health problem in spite of education about “safe sex,” since the vast majority of HIV infections come either from drug abuse or sexual pairings — both heterosexual and homosexual — that ignore the Bible’s wisdom on the subject.

The mean streets will stay mean:

Drive-by shootings will not cease making victims of the innocent.

The blight of gangs and their graffiti will continue creeping into previously “safe” communities.

Racist attitudes among whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians — did I leave anyone out? — will persist in helping our rationalizations as to why “we” had to do such-and-such to “them” to balance what “they” did to “us.”

And, many social scientists will still justify all kinds of destructive behavior by making us all believe we are victims and therefore not responsible for our behavior.

A common thread runs through all these predictions: the problem of sin. Until we get the sin problem solved — or at least brought under much greater control than it is now — we will find our society continuing its plunge toward self-destruction.

But, I also have two, more positive, predictions:

Christian people — and others who order their lives on belief in God — will remain a potent force for good, a beacon of light piercing the moral darkness of our times.

And, the church, even though it consists of sinners such as we are, will be the most powerful voice for sanity and spirituality in a world that seems at times to be deaf to the voice of God.

These two factors help me to be a cautious optimist — or a hopeful pessimist — as we face 2013. God is still at work on his creation.

Paul Leavens is the Minister Lindsay Christian Church. Visit the church website at www.lindsaychristianchurch.org.