By Michael E. Brooks

"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!" (Matt. 23:37).

It was almost exactly twenty years ago that I was in a truly large city for the first time. The city was Cairo, Egypt, and though I have been in other metropolises since, I still remember the impact of that first experience. Urbanization is a fact of life that we all know intellectually, but I am not sure the average person from middle America, or any other rural background, can really appreciate the reality until he or she has actually been there.

Traffic is part of it. You sit in the heat and the noise and the exhaust fumes and you just can't believe it. But that is only the surface. There is also the ghetto squalor and the fascinating blur of all those different people and vehicles and sights and sounds and smells that assault your senses. But again, that is not really "it".

Why do people come into the city in such huge numbers? If newspaper and broadcast opinions can be trusted, it is largely about hope and opportunity. Our rural areas don't provide the jobs, the diversity, the upward mobility that we see in the city. And so we flock en masse, looking for that solution to our economic woes that we have come to believe the big city offers. And, certainly, some find it. But far more find only the filth, the stench, and the despair of too many people in too small a space.

First century Jerusalem was a small, rather insignificant town, even by the standards of the day. Yet it attracted the needy just as do our cities today. And one newcomer, not needy but there to help those who were, looked upon it and saw the despair, and it almost broke his heart. "Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem," Jesus cried! Can you help but wonder how he would have viewed our immense urban sprawls? But we know don't we? He does view them with compassion and urgency just as he did while here on earth. "Go into all the world," surely means "go into the cities," and preach and minister and care, just as He did so long ago.

This is not offered as some kind of contribution to missions methodology, but as a personal reaction to the impact yet another huge city has recently made. I have just spent a few days in Dhaka, Bangladesh, home to more than ten million souls. Much of that time was spent in frustration and irritation, stuck in traffic, bothered by beggars, wishing for some clean country air. Is that a true Christian reaction? No, not really. Rather, I wish I had spent more time seeing opportunity, interacting with people, seeking mission. Our cities have many tremendous problems. They are filled with despair, poverty and need. But they also are filled with those seeking hope and "life more abundant." May we find ways and means to help them find it.