Thy Kingdom Come

This was said by Virginia Tech professor and poet Nikki Giovanni at a Tuesday evening memorial convocation at the Blacksburg campus. I think it is a beautiful thought in the wake of a tragedy.

We are sad today, and we will be sad for quite a while. We are not moving on, we are embracing our mourning. ... We do not understand this tragedy. We know we did nothing to deserve it, but neither does a child in Africa dying of AIDS, neither do the invisible children walking the night away to avoid being captured by the rogue army, neither does the baby elephant watching his community being devastated for ivory, neither does the Mexican child looking for fresh water, neither does the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of the night in his crib in the home his father built with his own hands being run over by a boulder because the land was destabilized. No one deserves a tragedy.

In light of this, I'm reminded that evil is not in this world because God doesn't exist or because God isn't good. Evil is in this world, because God exists and He is good. He made man, and he wanted man's love to be true--not forced. He allowed Adam & Eve to choose Him, but they chose sin. I've done the same. You've done the same. Regardless, Jesus Christ came. He brought with him the Kingdom of God. It is at hand. We are not waiting for the kingdom to come; we're living in it. God's kingdom is now, and it is real.