I saw someone I hadn’t seen in a while, and she and I were catching up. We both knew a lot of mutual people, folks that I hadn’t seen in a good long while, so I was asking her about them.

There was not positive “gossip” about one of them.

One had been in and out of jail for child pornography, one had been hooked on heroin, one had fallen from a 5-story building and was now wheelchair bound and living in a tent behind an apartment complex, one had lost a restaurant and was now living in the slums.

How do we get so broken? I knew these people. They weren’t that bad off when I knew them. Maybe the seeds of brokenness were there though.

I don’t know how in the world these folks, these old acquaintances of mine, will be able to claw through the muck of their lives and be transformed by God’s grace.

It’s a hard road for all of us.

Even if we feel even-keeled for a time, it’s so easy to slip back into the cracks of our old routine, our “old men and old women,” to echo Paul.

It really does take a miracle of God. God has to reach down to them. And why he hasn’t done so yet, why there are so many people like these folks living miserable lives, I won’t even pretend to know.

I know a lot of the fault lies with you and me, and other folks who have it slightly better. Especially us Christians. We who are supposed to be harbingers of God’s kingdom on earth.

I sat here in the coffeeshop after hearing about all these old friends I knew, thinking, “What in the world could I do to help them? Would it do any good? Or would their misery and misfortune flood me out?”

To be honest, those are the questions I sat here asking, and those are the questions to which I had no answer.

I don’t know how to fix broken people.

And I think that, if we just went out there, thinking we could transform them just by helping them out materially, we would fail miserably in the process.

We must plant the love of God in peoples’ hearts, we must water, we must sow, we must do what we can.

I’m just not sure how to do that.

So right now, hearing about old friends who have… completely… and utterly… lost their way in this world – I just don’t know what to do to help them.

They need total transformation. They need a new mind.

And that truly takes an act of God.