Monday, March 24, 2008

Bad news

I killed a baby last night. It lay in a basin while I filled the basin with water and I just wasn't paying attention. I can close my eyes and I still vividly remember turning around and the shock setting in as I looked at the baby, entirely submersed in the water, lying so still. Actually, I don't even have to close my eyes to see it.
It was a dream, it was only a dream.
The night before that there was a huge gang of bad guys with knives.
Only a dream, I remind myself.

It's just one more aspect of the bad news that surrounds everyone, it just happens to follow me into my dreams. And I wonder how many others out there are tired of it as well? Surely, someone is.
Even trying not to hear it, I'm still swamped with it. This one died, this one has cancer, some guy I'll never know just died because he was at wal-mart when some other guy decided to shoot someone, and don't forget the old man, literally sick with grief, who doesn't want to live now that he's lost his wife who, by the way, didn't get appropriate treatment because they couldn't afford healthcare. At lunch a couple of weeks back, I actually had to leave the table at lunch as my dad began describing in vivid detail a 6 yr old that ultimately, and mercifully died - I ultimately ended up watching cartoons with my 7 yr old nephew. He had the best ideas of all of us.
I go home and check my mail and there's a child looking at me from the envelope with cystic fibrosis. Will I give even $5.00 to help find a cure?
The jokes give laughs about someone being hurt, or being unfaithful to their significant other. The games make sport of killing other people. The movies make light of the gut wrenching, life changing events that destroy the lives of the "audience" that is the victims.

But then I imagine that no ones gut has been wrenched. We're too immune for it. We have to be. If we truly felt for each and every sorrow that we saw, or heard about, and we grieved over it... we would never stop grieving. Literally. There's just too many.

There's just too many.

I realize I'm not alone in feeling afraid and hurt, there are people everywhere just like me. And I'd like to think I speak for all of us when I say:

God, I just want to see you do something.

I want Him to be louder, and more newsworthy than all the other stuff that's out there. Maybe I don't see Him doing major things just because I'm not open enough to see it. But I feel short-changed sitting on the Christian side of things celebrating the miracle that is another day, while the enemy celebrates 4,000 abortions every day.

If I stand back up into Christianity again, start walking and following, once again, it has to be different this time. Everything else is just mediocre, and I'm sick of mediocre. The biggest problem is that I don't yet know how it would be different. I have no direction. And I guess that's what makes the whole Psalms 18:32 all the more frustrating. "It is God who arms me with strength and makes my way perfect".

I don't even have a "way".

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