For those of us in the next generation of Christians, those of us who find ourselves alive in this day as strangers in a fallen world, that groaning is still inside each of us. It seems louder every year, with each sad tale of death on the largest and smallest scales, from the casualties of young children caught in the crossfire of distant conflict to the sterile death of a woman in a hospital bed.

While God is able to bring goodness even out of great evil, suffering and death are not the tools of a merciful God. They are the sad consequence of a fallen world, one separated from glory.

For many, the slow, painful dehydration and death of one woman, Terri Schiavo, is enough to make one question what kind of civilized society we inhabit today. What strange fashion of humanity is it that finds the disabled to be broken, useless and therefore expendable? What is the source for this unvoiced dictum that makes the weak, the dull-witted, the deformed, the unborn and the elderly into victims of a quest for quiet social efficiency? Has America lost what conscience we had left?

What you think about the death of Terri Schiavo depends a lot on your personal experience. You may think her passing was a tragic commentary on our society. You may think her death was just the end of a sad and shameful process. You may still feel lingering anger toward whomever you blame -- a husband with questionable motives, a legal precedent that devalues life or the oft-mentioned tidal wave of judicial activism.

There are certainly easy targets for this frustration: first among them is her husband Michael Schiavo, who may indeed have loved Terri, but showed a different attitude through his actions -- becoming engaged to another woman, with whom he now has two children -- in the years since Terri’s accident. There is a judge marked for his stubbornness over seven years of rebuttals to Terri’s parents. There is the normal chorus of groups who work daily in favor of the devaluation of life -- the activists, the lawyers and even the churches who long ago forgot that ours is a faith that honors each life as a unique creation, made in the image of God.

Many good people in the Christian, pro-life and conservative community spoke out loudly in Terri’s favor. They tried to find a legal solution that would prevent Mr. Schiavo’s opinion from standing. They tried to use political avenues to achieve a just result for Terri’s parents. They invested all of their effort into trying to find a solution that would not result in death.

The laws in Florida, and in most states across the country, are harshly consistent. In cases where someone is caught in a circumstance like Terri, with no legal indication of what they wanted in the case of brain damage, a coma or “Persistent Vegetative State” (PVS), other people are given the authority to decide whether the victim’s life is worth living. Others decide whether the weak and infirm should live or die.

And on the heels of such death we must recognize that those of us who stood by and allowed the culture of death to become the law of the land bear the blame.

Faced with this circumstance, the question becomes: what are we to do?

We cannot give ourselves over to the notion that we should do nothing. Though that is the easiest course: “I am but one person, what can I do?” It is an easy lie, and we all know it in our hearts.

Nor should we embrace the false idea that Terri Schiavo’s death has some kind of greater meaning and purpose that we cannot perceive -- that it was somehow “part of God’s plan” to further His work. This is an idea taken up by far too many in the church, and embraced by shallow political leaders. It is a view that’s usually based on a profound misreading of Job and the whole of Christian theology. Paul exhorted us to hate what is evil, and hold fast to what is good -- not mistake the vile inhumanity of man for the Almighty’s purpose.

We believe in a gospel of redemption. While God is able to bring goodness even out of great evil, suffering and death are not the tools of a merciful God. They are the sad consequence of a fallen world, one separated from glory – and in His sacrifice, God’s Son bears that wretched burden for us. Christ came not to condemn us in our evil ways, but to bring us out of sin and misery and into fellowship with the Father.

In the end, the answer to that question is clear. For those of us in this next generation of Christians, it is time to stop making excuses and start being honest with each other and with God. There are things we all can do, and things we all ought to, in our own lives and communities. There is the family member going through difficulty. There is the friend without a place to turn. There is the crisis pregnancy center in need of support. And prayer is the best place to start.

Over 25 years ago theologian Francis Schaeffer and Dr. C. Everett Koop described the place we are standing today. Their book, Whatever Happened to the Human Race, was written in response to what they rightly foresaw as the cultural embrace of abortion and euthanasia, and it issued a call we should hear again:

If we do not take a stand here and now, we certainly cannot lay claim to being the salt of the earth in our generation. We are neither preserving moral values and dignity of the individual nor showing compassion for our fellow human beings. Will future generations look back and remember that -- even if the 20th century did end with a great surge of inhumanity -- at least there was one group who stood consistently, whatever the price, for the value of the individual, thus passing on some hope to future generations? Or are we Christians going to be merely swept along with the trends -- our own moral values becoming increasingly befuddled, our own apathy reflecting the apathy of the world around us, our own inactivity sharing the inertia of the masses around us, our own leadership becoming soft?

There is hope. This young generation is realizing we cannot live isolated in a Christian enclave. For those of us who believe there is no such thing as an insignificant person, we must renew our efforts to reach this fallen world. We know our responsibilities; we are called to be salt and light -- to hate what is evil, and hold fast to what is good.

The path is set before us, and we must follow it.