Moody ramblings

I haven't experienced a lot of significant suffering in my life. I haven't had to go through losing someone very close to me, I haven't lived through a war in my own neighborhood, I've never wondered where my next meal will come from. Strange that I feel like I have suffered so much, just being alive. I have felt so much pain and loss and grief and frustration, most of it self-inflicted or seemingly so. As though I could have avoided it all had I been smarter, more obedient, less willfull, more reasonable. I wonder, though, what suffering I would have felt had I been all those things.

In the past couple of weeks, I've been tracking the blog of a young woman whose husband suffered from pancreatic cancer. He was diagnosed just after they got married less than two years ago. Between then and now, they had twins. He died Wednesday night. I can only imagine what that must feel like -- somehow, my heart aches and my eyes well with tears, imagining what she is going through. I suppose that's what compassion is. I wonder at the fact that God gave us this capacity for compassion.

Last night, Richard and I watched the movie, "Blood Diamond." This is a movie about the role the diamond trade played in fuelling civil war in Sierra Leone (among other places) less than a decade ago. I've been to Sierra Leone twice as part of my job (it was actually the first country in Africa I spent any time in); Richard lived there for a time and visits regularly. I love the country -- it is astonishingly beautiful and harsh and inviting and intimidating and maddening all at the same time. The movie, as intended, cut deep into my heart. It captured the senseless killing and unspeakable violence, the tearing apart of families, the loss of innocence of thousands of boys forced to be soldiers and made into instruments of terror. It captured the desperation of a man trapped in chaos, driven to find and protect his child. It captured the power that money and wealth command when hearts are hardened by violence, evil, and the almost complete absence of hope for anything better. It captured the stunning reality of the endless possibility for redemption.

I was sobbing before I went to bed last night and found myself in tears again this morning. A part of me longs to enter into a warzone -- there are so many, they are all around us -- just to suffer with those who are suffering, to give suffering a name or an explanation that is bigger than I am, to be with those who seem to be without hope but are living just a stone's throw from redemption. Another part of me thinks this is ridiculous and insulting and unfairly glamourizing the life of the suffering. A part of me thinks we can enter into suffering wherever we are, or we can choose to turn away from it -- from our own, from another's. We can be a part of the redemption or we can join in the evil, be complacent and self-obsessed and hard-hearted. I fear that without even thinking about it I make the wrong choice more often than not, and I wonder if it would be any different if I lived in another country or another time. I don't know.



(Photo from my last trip to Sierra Leone, taken by Michael J. Fiedler.)