We ordered pizza this week.  Big deal, right?  The pizza guy came to our door and, because it was stifling hot on the front porch, we invited him in.  The first thing I noticed (besides the smell of a scrumptious veggie pizza with bacon) was a cross dangling on this young man’s neck.  He couldn’t have been more than 20 years old.

Of course, I had to say something!  “Hey, I like your cross.”

He replied, “Thanks.  Not everyone does.”

“Really?”

“Yep.  Really.  Some people really get upset when I wear it.  And yesterday I wore a Penn State shirt and I really caught it for that.”

For those of you outside of Pennsylvania, the Sandusky child molestation case and the blame shifting to Joe Paterno has saturated our local headlines.  I met a Penn State college student who was working as a cashier at Wal-Mart for the summer who was devastated by the way the late Joe Paterno was portrayed.  According to her, the mood on campus was “it’s not fair”.

I won’t get into Penn State politics on all of that, but I wanted to point out with great sadness that our young people are swimming in the mucky soup of decisions made by adults in their world.  Day after day they walk in a world that is increasingly corrupt and most of them aren’t even sure how it got to be this difficult.  I didn’t ask the pizza delivery guy, but chances are the ones who were giving him the hardest time his about Penn State shirt and his cross necklace were probably people over forty.

This brings me back to the vision I had of the multitudes in the Valley of Decision.  Christians were standing above the valley on the sides of the ravine holding life-sized crosses.  And down below, in the great canyon floor, were multitudes of people who were lost and had not yet made a decision for their eternal future.

In this vision, the Christians called, “Look up here!  Look up here!  This is the way!”

There were three people represented in that valley of lost souls:

1. A business woman with a cell phone in hand heard the Christians crying, glanced up and saw the cross, but went back to her i-Phone.

2.  A forty-something man shook his fist at God and cursed him.

3. A 20-something young man looked up and said, “That’s what I want.  That’s what I need.”  And he took the hand of his girlfriend and together wove their way through the crowd in the Valley of Decision and made their way to the Christian calling to them with the cross.

Kind of makes you want to order pizza, doesn’t it?