I'm not sure what's been going on in my life the last six months, but I have been surrounded by stories of mass murder and genocide everywhere I turn.

My personal Bible study this spring has been the book of Esther, where one woman tries to prevent the complete annihilation of the Jewish people. Our church has been teaching on the book of Judges for the last month or so, one tale of mass slaughter after another. My husband and I decided to finally watch the amazing miniseries Band of Brothers, where every episode concludes with the major losses within Easy Company (or the total losses in a battle). One entire episode is devoted to concentration camps.

As if that wasn't enough, a friend emailed me a link to a fabulous mapping website where I went to look for good world maps. What I found were maps of the European Holocaust during WWII and decimated villages in Darfur's civil war (and of course I linked over to Wikipedia to read about the history of that war). And these are just the real stories...

For the last six months, I've been watching and blogging on Battlestar Galactica, a five-year long TV series I've enjoyed—in which humans are pursued by machines for the purpose of extinction. And for date night last week, guess what we went to see? Terminator: Salvation. Yep, more of the same. Humanity seems to have a penchant for genocide. So much so that we project our affinity for annihilation into stories about machines we've created—as if it's a mathematical formula that a machine would be equally likely to arrive at. Control issues + threat to existence = mass murder.

So, what can I make of all this talk of genocide swirling around my head? Am I to believe that the world is ripe for a new era of persecution? Well, if I believe history repeats itself, yes. It is high time. And with growing disdain for Christianity worldwide, I can't help but feel like the red laser marks a spot somewhere near the center of my forehead. In all honesty, it can get really depressing sometimes to look at the history of mankind—to see all that we have done and ponder what we will do again. Sometimes the world just seems entirely too big for me. So much so that at times, I don't know what is the next right thing to do. It certainly makes me want to pray more, but I'm not a natural pessimist. And neither is God apparently.

In my Bible reading, I keep running across passages where people have escaped persecution, where God has protected his own, and where He asks one simple thing of us day to day: to reach out and affect those around us for good. Yes, the world is endlessly striving toward evil, but there is still hope. This is where Terminator links in to all of my recent genocide encounters. In the first assault on Skynet, one man survives—John Connor. He survives to continue bringing hope and a "message" to the resistance. One line in the movie kept standing out to me: "You are the resistance." He reminds the people over and over again how important they are to the survival of mankind. He gives them reasons to keep going. He teaches them that every single one of them matters, even if their numbers are few.

These messages keep cropping up in my Bible readings, too. Even though the world seems like an endless ocean of need and one tiny act of kindness feels like less than a drop in that ocean, it matters to God. Why? There was apparently a study done of WWII, and it was discovered that only 1 in 5 soldiers actually fired their weapons. What if 5 out of 5 had gone into each battle shooting? How much greater and sooner would have been the victory? One act of kindness (whether to our families, our neighbors or complete strangers) is like a bullet, not meant to kill, but meant to infuse hope and life into another human being. Today, I may get to be a John Connor for someone who needs to hear that God genuinely cares that they are alive. And what if 5 out of 5 Christ-loving people discovered the same reality?

What we do matters. How we love matters. Though the numbers of those who follow Christ are still very few on the worldwide map, every drop of kindness and love toward another human being merges into a stream, becomes a river, and pours into world's the ocean of need. I believe that's the picture God sees. So, when I'm feeling overwhelmed by world events, historical trends, and even movies that make me feel quite small, I can always go back to the simple idea of loving one person every day.I am the resistance. You are the resistance. The world may be too big for us, but it's not too big for God's plan. He loves the entire world through us.