Earlier this summer, I had the privilege to lead one of our mission teams from Heritage Church to Christchurch, New Zealand. Our team flew out of Chicago late Saturday afternoon for our long journey. Our first flight took us to Los Angeles where we would catch our long flight over the Pacific Ocean to Auckland. We left LAX around 10:30 pm Saturday night for the twelve hour plus flight. In the course of our journey, we flew over the International Date Line which ultimately propelled us forward a day. We left on Saturday night and landed on Monday morning. In all my travels, this is the first time I have actually skipped an entire day during the course of a flight. I must admit, not having the chance to live out a day messes with your mind a little and at the very least throws the rest of your week completely out of whack.
This novelty of international travel to New Zealand of missing a complete day is a good story and conversation piece. But for me, it has become much more than a novelty or conversation piece. This experience is something I have reflected on over the past two months and continue to reflect on even now as I am writing. It has caused me to ask myself, What Happened to Sunday? There is so much wrapped up in this question for me. It has caused me to reflect on the days and life I have been given. What opportunities I have captured and seized and what opportunities I have forfeited out of complacency or aborted out of fear before they were ever given life. As long as God gives us breath and grants us another day to live, we are given 86,440 seconds, 1440 minutes, 24 hours in each day.
There is something about missing a day that doesn’t seem fair or right. Sometimes we miss days out of choice, illness, tragedy or neglect. In my case on the way to New Zealand, I gave up a day to gain an even greater experience of new friendships, new ministry opportunities and the beauty of God’s creation in a place I had never seen or been before. Ultimately, as I have worked through and reflected on the significance of what God has been trying to teach me through the experience of missing Sunday, I continue to come back to the plight of millions of orphans who miss days, weeks, months and years of their lives. For so many of them, there is no positive story or gain by giving up a day. For the orphan, they just forfeit another day of their lives unloved, untouched and uncared for in way too many cases.
Last year, I read a statement from Dr. Russell Moore in a proposed resolution he submitted to the Southern Baptist Convention in 2009 on Adoption and Orphan Care. Dr. Moore wrote, “Upward of 150 million orphans now languish without families in orphanages, group homes, and placement systems in North America and around the world.” Overall, there was not much information in this particular statement I was not already aware of, but the word that grabbed my attention and has unsettled my spirit ever since is the word, “Languish.” I am sure I had heard the word before but did not pay much attention to it or fully understand its meaning. As I sought out the definition of languish, my heart broke even more. Languish: To be or become weak or feeble; lose strength or vigor. To exist or continue in miserable or disheartening conditions. To remain unattended or be neglected. To become downcast or pine away in longing: languish apart from friends and family; languish for a change from dull routine.
For millions of orphans, they would long to ask, What Happened to Sunday? If it was only a matter of losing one day of their life out of care free living, selfishness or even complacency. But for most, one day turns into weeks, months and years until they lose the capacity to even ask what happened to Sunday if they ever had the ability at all. These institutionalized children often suffer delays emotionally, physically and socially because they lack the very basic needs God created for children to develop within a family. So children who would otherwise have no emotional, physical or social delays, develop such issues due to a lack of touch, love and food a child needs to grow and develop. For those orphans who already have special needs, their plight can often be worse because their value is perceived to be even less than the other children.
So the spiritual battle for the very soul of every orphan wages on. An enemy who comes to kill, steal and destroy those most precious to God happens every day around the world. So I continue to ask myself, how do I converge the desire to make everyday of my life count for God knowing the lives of so many precious children waist away day by day simply because of the environment in which they live. How do the nameless faces become real to those who love God and call upon His name? How do we make Sunday real to those children who at this point cannot even fathom what it would mean to be a part of a loving family? So what is your role in making sure you don’t reach the end of your life asking, What Happened to Sunday?
