Midnight Madness

In 1980, I attended the opening performance for “Children of a Lesser God” a Broadway play bringing out the captivity and enlightenment of deaf citizens. As a totally blind person, I was interested in knowing how deaf actors approached their roles in a Broadway setting. The largest minority of citizens are the handicapped. The largest group of disabled citizens are those who are deaf, numbering somewhere around 20 million. I have often had people ask me if I would choose blindness or deafness. The problem with deaf citizens is that they never have the intelligence potential of others because so many of the intricacies of life depend on sound.

Gallaudet University is the first all deaf university in the world, was founded in 1864 and has an enrollment of around 1,500 students each semester. Sign language is a universal language and is not specific enough to bring out the highest intelligence quotients in most deaf students. Many deaf students do not graduate from high school. There is a debatable rational of success in dealing with deaf students. There is a fear connected with deafness that most “normal people” cannot understand. As in blindness, the fear of an unknown and unexpected limits one's ability to perform tasks which the normal person considers simple. Just thinking of what could happen, very much as a race car driver usually has his problem at a turn where he and he alone encounters the fear of what could go wrong. I often think, it is very much like Christ standing outside the church looking in. I believe our blessed Lord, standing outside, where he has been placed too many times thinks, “what is wrong with those people?”

In this day, where there are so many factories all over the country, standing silent and idle, full of machinery and the tools to do many things if active and working, like the church, nothing is produced, nothing accomplished. Let us remember that the light from the stars or even light from the sun, is not strong and bright enough to penetrate a black heart. A power which many do not have but is easily assessable is the power that raised Lazarus from the dead, is the power of God, that can overturn this midnight darkness of our lives.

After Christ, on that first Easter morning, left his tomb and walked on the road with Cleopas and another unnamed disciple, he talked with them about everything that had happened in the Christian walk since the foundation of the world. They did not recognize him until the breaking of bread when he was eating with them. Would you not like to have been one of those walking with Him and hearing His words? But would you, like most of today's followers, say I would like to walk with you but I am so busy, I have another appointment? This is the midnight madness of the world in which we live, with insane actions bombarding us from all over the world every day. We do not take the time to walk and talk with Jesus, to study His word, to seek His answers for our problems but rather like the deaf, the blind, the crippled, we seek answers everywhere except the right place. We do not worship a Savior who cannot be approached in our time of midnight madness. He was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. Isaiah 53:3

No where in scripture do we find that Christ spent any time in acts of enjoyment. It is hard to imagine Christ on the golf course or at an athletic event, when then as now, there was and is so much madness all around us. (Christ's entire ministry was at a time of horrific Roman occupation.) Our enemy now as then, is the world, the flesh and the devil. We have no record of Paul and the disciples debating with unbelievers. They lived their faith in front of them and in spite of them.

Recently, in a public building, I was going up some stair steps and a young woman came rushing down the steps, knocked me down, broke my white cane (White canes are very tough, not easily broken.) Then I heard her tell another man, coming up an adjoining hallway, to tell the old blind man she knocked down the steps that she was sorry, but she was late for a church meeting. Such is today's Christians in a world of midnight madness showing their faith at a time when Christian witness is more important than ever.

We know that no one can love like Jesus loved. We know that no one can be as Christ-like as was Christ. In a time when the state-controlled media dominates our interpretation of life and world activities, when a fear of Iran is as great as the fear of “Niger Yellow Cake” just a few years ago, we must not allow the madness of the world to bring on a midnight of doubts and unbelief affecting our faith.

The vast majority of Americans do not want financial bailouts. The vast majority of Americans do not want abortion and euthanasia. The vast majority of Americans do not want socialized health care. The vast majority of Americans do not want same-sex marriage. When the Episcopalians, Lutherans, and other religious groups ordain gay priests, this is not the madness desired by most Christians and most church goers. I refuse to believe that descent hardworking, taxpaying Americans have given up every evidence of good sense to satisfy the politically correct.