A Tangled Webb

I get depressed sometimes when I look around. I think that the news and those commercials with starving brown kids affect me a little more than they do most people. Not because I’m more sensitive or loving. Just because I’ve lived in those kinds of places. I get sad when I look at my digital oven and moving car and think about my cousins and in-laws who live under a thatched roof. Or when I think about my greatest danger being getting to and from work while my friend Tal-ban is driving a taxi in Pakistan’s northern areas. Also, I have a great imagination, so I can very clearly picture what it might feel like to have my father’s shop blown up by protesters or have my family killed in a war that they were not fighting.

All this can get debilitating, I think. Even in the Bible we read things like a time for war … a time to die. There is a time for everything, y’know? There is even a time for murder and hate and genocide and religious violence and immoral politics.

But this, too, shall be made right.

There oughtn’t be a time for war and death and sorrow and pain. But for now there is a time for it. But it shall be made right.

I wonder, then, if we will help usher in that time? Or shall we sit back and watch?

Of course, none of this will touch any of us unless we love. We were made to love. Isn’t love great? Sometimes I get upset because my wife is away, but then I think about the people she loves over there and I think about how much love she is pouring into that place. And then things get better (also, I sometimes just sit and stare at this picture).
Check out my wife’s widow project: i117