"The Room of Lost Souls"

I've seen this article several places this week and several of my favorite bloggers have posted about it. The imagery is too powerful not to pass along. Oregon State Hospital, the mental institution where the 1975 movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was filmed, is being torn down and replaced.

"Politicians had been talking for years about the need to replace the hospital, but didn't get serious about it until a group of legislators made a grim discovery during a 2004 tour: the cremated remains of 3,600 mental patients in corroding copper canisters in a storage room. The lawmakers were stunned."

"Nobody said anything to anybody," said Oregon Senate President Peter Courtney, who dubbed the chamber "the room of lost souls."

"The remains belonged to patients who died at the hospital from the late 1880s to the mid-1970s, when mental illness was considered so shameful that many patients were all but abandoned by their families in institutions."

Assault, sexual abuse, overcrowding, disease wasn't enought. It wasn't until they saw the remains of dead people that they decided to get off their "blessed assurance" and do something. What about us? What about the church? What about you and me? What will it take to convict us and motivate us to be Jesus to the dying world around us? People are either alive in Christ or dead in sin.

God give us Your eyes to see people with Your heart. And give us a sense of urgency to do something about it now, before it's too late.