Facing it.

The world this week is heartbreaking. The small and oppressed suffer, those in power abuse their power, the condemned and the innocent die without fair trial, the very earth shakes and and buildings fall on the people who live in them or are walking beside them. I can’t look. I can’t look away. 

I have spent years looking away. Waking up in the morning has been hard enough for my fragile mind sometimes without adding the sorrow of the world. But today I’m staring sorrow and suffering in the face, trying not to turn away. And the truth is that we get the whole of the world’s sorrow delivered to us, much the same way God does, and we don’t have the heart or shoulders of God. 

Not a sparrow falls without God’s care. And somehow, the beauty that he witnesses, that lives in the universe and in his heart, is enough to swallow the pain. He is joyful and sorrowful, at once, even with all he sees. And the beauty is everywhere, it is in men who sing hymns as they are killed, it is in people who take care of one another when they are left with nothing but rubble, it is in children offering water to police, or people standing in front of police as human shields. It is in simple love between men and women. It is in you, as you care for your children or your parents. Love is more powerful than anything.

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Nepal is deep in my heart. I fell in love in Nepal, and I held my husband’s hand for the first time there. In Nepal I attended some of the most joyful churches I have ever seen, filled with women who live in more hardship than I can fathom. I have felt darkness, seen madness. I spent a day with Chinua trying to help a madman in the streets of Kathmandu. I met one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen, an older auntie who sells vegetables and dances when we sing songs to Jesus. So many of us love that country, we have fallen in love with its mountains and people, we cringe at the fallen buildings, ancient landmarks. 

And all around the world the unseen sorrows happen. The countries none of us have traveled to, the people who don’t make the news. The people killed by police violence when a video camera wasn’t readily available. And not even a sparrow falls without God seeing it. There are deep mysteries and my understanding can’t hold it all, but I know that the light shines brighter and will break forth like the dawn. All the sad things will become untrue, as Timothy Keller quotes from The Lord of the Rings. 

I usually choose to write about beautiful things. God draws us into Beauty and Love, and because of the evil in the world, we sometimes have to look hard to find it. This is our work—to see and acknowledge the beauty and love in the world, to be thankful, to live simply and give our money away to those who need it, to notice the small, to give a voice to those who can’t normally be heard, to pray, to tell the truth about what we see. It is what I want to do in my life— art is meaningful because it is another voice saying that the darkness does not overcome the light, and to live in the heart of God is to turn our faces to sorrow and then to live in joy. I fight hopelessness every day. And yet I see how prideful hopelessness is: to say there is no hope because we cannot see it ourselves, when all around us, those who suffer more take a stand and say that hope is with us and all around us, they sing as they die and refuse to hate. Do not give into darkness, friends. Light is so much stronger. (And in my next post I'll tell you a little about my travels with my sister.)