mmitment She reported on the shocking realities of her 10-day stay in the overcrowded asylum in the New York World, a newspaper owned at the time by Joseph Pulitzer, and in Ten Days in a Madhouse, a book published the same year. Bly described the asylum as a “human rat trap. It’s easy to get in,” she wrote, “but once there it is impossible to get out.” After being admitted, she stopped acting as though she was insane. However, “the more sanely I talked and acted,” she later said, “the crazier I was thought to be by all.” As a result of Nellie Bly’s stay at the Blackwell’s Island Asylum and the ensuing publicity her reporting received, the city invested $1 million into the facility, released immigrant patients who had been admitted simply because they could not be understood, and fired numerous staff. It was Bly’s act of becoming one with the forgotten, the downtrodden, the mistreated, that led to monumental changes that improved the lives of thousands of people.
He Came Into His Own
It could easily be said that the world Jesus entered 2,000 years ago was a madhouse. At the time of Jesus’ birth, Galilee was ruled by a paranoid tyrant who ordered the execution of every infant child in the town of Bethlehem. Nazareth, the town in which Jesus was raised, had such a poor rep-
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utation that one of Jesus’ future disciples asked if anything good could come out of the place (John 1:46). The dark world of the insane asylum entered by Nellie Bly was cruel and unforgiving. The world entered by Jesus was monstrously worse. By the time Jesus came to earth, “sin had become a science, and vice was consecrated as a part of religion.”1 What would drive someone like Nellie Bly to take on an assignment so risky, so potentially dangerous? Bly was an outsized personality. Later in life she became an inventor and a successful businesswoman. In between times she set a record for the fastest journey around the world, arriving back in Hoboken, New Jersey, 72 days after her departure. Born a year before the Civil War in the United States ended and raised near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Bly lived a colorful life of adventure and notoriety. But few would argue that the lasting contribution she made to the world was her service to the unfortunate. It often takes a radical commitment to a cause to bring about lasting change. Think of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., or Nelson Mandela, all of whom brought change at an enormous cost to themselves. Yet it is the incarnation of Jesus— Jesus, the divine Son of God, coming to the earth to live as a man—that represents the most staggering demonstra-
tion of selflessness ever witnessed. This wasn’t 10 days in an asylum followed by an attorney’s demand for release, then articles, books, adventure, and wealth. This was the Sovereign of the universe leaving heaven—“eye hath not seen nor ear heard”—and entering a world without a moral rudder where enemies of God were seeing to take His life. Jesus was still a baby when His earthly father fled Bethlehem with his family so Jesus would not be killed.
On Point
But the incarnation of Christ would not be like any other birth in history. Jesus was born for a purpose, a singular purpose. And that purpose is still being worked out in millions of lives. Speaking of Jesus, Paul wrote in Philippians 2:6, 7: “Who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men” (NASB).2 Jesus was a man on a mission. The inmates on Planet Earth must have the opportunity to know the true God and experience salvation from sin. Imagine for a moment if Nellie Bly’s mission had ended in failure. What would those suffering in the New York City lunatic asylum, women forced to sit all day on hard benches in enforced silence, the broken souls doused in ice-cold water, totally cut off from the
December 2017 | Adventist World
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