In all my experience with drug addicts and people living on the street, I've yet to meet one who's actually starving to death. The people I meet who are really suffering are dying of loneliness. No one cares what happens to them. Yes, they usually bear some responsibility for this. The point is, God does not intend for any of us to live in isolation, and when we do, there are predictable, destructive consequences. This is something I see all the time: someone comes to Jesus, then spends years trying to figure out how to be a Christian all by herself. From the earliest forms of Judaism reflected in the Old Testament all the way through the first 1500 years of the organized church, there was no such thing as a lone Christian...they were a contradiction in terms. If you were one, you were not the other. The Enlightenment introduced the idea that the average joe could reason this Christianity thing out, then do it all on his/her own...Jesus became just another mystery to be comprehended by the senses.
News flash: It isn't possible.
Why do shepherds keep sheep together? A lone sheep is a meal waiting to happen. Not to say that the enemy won't attack when we're strongest...that's simply untrue. I do mean to say that we're at our most vulnerable when we're isolated. When Jesus heals people, he doesn't just heal their physical maladies; remember, being blind or crippled in some way meant being a social outcast in the 1st century AD. Furthermore, Judaism of that period would have viewed a person with that sort of handicap as being under the direct curse of God...they were ritually defiled, unable to cleanse themselves in the Temple. They were trapped, doomed to hell because of their sickness. Jesus comes along and changes the whole playing field. He doesn't just heal the exterior issue...he returns the person to his/her life, restores him/her to his/her family. He gives them their lives back.
Jesus wants to give us our lives back. That means first restoring our relationship to our Creator. It also means restoring our relationships with eachother. The bible really seems almost to equate the two in importance, or at least says that where we find restoration with God, we should find restoration with each other.

One of the biggest philosophical questions in history is whether mankind is intrinsically good or instrinsically bad. I think the question fundamentally misunderstands man as a creation. We are, intrinsically, a reflection of the One who created us. Whenever there is a creator/created relationship, the created must find an identity in it relation to the creator; otherwise its exsistence is senseless. We were created to love God perfectly and to experience the extasy of holiness in that relationship, but the problem is that we live in the inevitability of sin. We are a fallen creation. We wander when left to our own devices, hence one of my favorite lyrics, from the hymn, "Come Thou Fount":

Prone to wander, Lord I feel it
Prone to leave the God I love

When we wander far enough, we leave behind the security of the boundaries God has put in place for us. We even wander far enought to leave behind our true identity (the "True Self" Thomas Merton writes about) as His creation. Life then becomes an endless search for meaning, like a person trying on someone else's clothing to see if anything fits.

One of the friends and neighbors down at the Old Savannah City Mission recently commented that God, "could not trust her". The idea of God trusting us or not is meaningless, actually, on a number of levels. What an interesting thought, though. God absolutely can't trust me to run my own life. I think drug addicts and alcoholics understand this statement better than most other people. I made a gigantic mess of the life that God had given me, and it never got any better until I gave it all back to God. It's as though I recieved a fine watch as a gift from my father, who is a watchmaker, then I spent 10 years smashing it to pieces with a hammer. Eventually, when I came to my senses and realized what I'd done to my father's precious gift, I realized that the only one who could fix it is the one who made it...my father. I had to take it back to him. Most of us are profoundly ashamed by the time we get to this point. We know what we've done...God's created us to feel the distance we place between ourselves and Him. After a while we learn this truth, though it is a great mystery at the same time: to gain our lives as God intends them to be, we must give them back to Him. Real freedom is found only in voluntary surrender. Does God trust you? He doesn't have to. He trusts in Himself. He is the God who makes covenant, then swears by himself (Gen 15, 22:15), so that when we break our end of the deal, which we always do, He pays the price for us.

If this struggle between the Spirit and the flesh is normal, then what's the problem? The problem is that we give up too soon. We quit before the miracle happens, and we never experience what God has planned.

When Hannah and I were in Lamaze classes before Gabe (the 4-year-old, our middle child) was born, our instructor taught us something that impacted me deeply. Predictably, what the women were most afraid of was the pain associated with childbirth. Rather than denying it, or teaching on ways to avoid the pain, she taught the women how to think differently about it. God has created each of us with an instinct to, as Don Williams puts it, "eat, avoid being eaten and procreate". There's something in each of us that works very, very hard to avoid pain, and when we do experience it, it usually exists to say, "whatever you're doing, stop doing it." The problem is, in our fallen state, this instinct is not always correct. Childbirth is a great example of this. Our Lamaze teacher taught us that pain in childbirth is a sign that everything is right. Every instinct in our bodies tell us to avoid it, but in this case avoiding it would result in the deaths of mother and child. The other thing she taught us was to focus on the fact that the pain was not pointless; you get a baby at the end of it.

What a powerful metaphor for re-thinking pain and struggle with sin. The NT authors use childbirth as a metaphor for conversion and the subsequent movement toward Christ, and they use it very intentionally. Through this process God births something new in us, even if it takes our whole lives to do it. The pain and struggle are not senseless, even if our limited perspectives tend to tell us they are. God is the One with the big picture; He has the long view. In the OT, Jacob walks away from his struggle with the angel with two things: a new name (Israel, which means "he struggles/wrestles/contends with God")...and a limp.

In The Ascent to Truth, Thomas Merton introduces the concept of the "false self" vs. "true self". The false self is who we perceive ourselves to be; the true self is who we actually are. There is generally a huge difference between the two. C.S. Lewis picks up this idea with a slightly different twist: the false self is who we are in our fallenness; the true self is who we are created to be...it's our redeemed nature. Though I won't get into the full complexity of the idea here, it's really very important to understand it because it explains a lot about the conflict we experience, not only within ourselves, but with each other. Both types of conflict are assumed biblically; both are explicitly addressed by Paul, Peter, James, John and the author of Hebrews. The idea is that conversion to Christianity introduces the true self with the advent of the Holy Spirit in our lives. From that point on, we struggle with who we are vs. the person God has redeemed. There is no dualism implied here...we are still one, who animated being who is either completely redeemed, or not redeemed at all. We can't do something bad, then blame it on the false self; there is no Christian "one armed man" to pin our crimes on. The point is, this struggle is normal, and in fact, if there's no struggle, it's not because you've won the battle. It's because you've given up. That's the idea expressed in Romans and Ephesians. The good news is that there's nothing wrong with this struggle...there's no condemnation between the Spirit and the flesh, as Paul puts it in Romans 8:1. We engage the struggle. Where there is struggle, there is Spirit.