My heart is aching. It feels like the world is spinning crazy, how it must have for European and Russian Jews during WWII. Too many broken lives, hearts, homes, even whole villages.
Yet the parking lot at the new upscale mall is full. The most expensive homes move quickly on the market. Plates piled with food go back to the kitchen, to the garbage, while bored diners toy with their cocktails and the dessert menu. Landfills are loaded with the now upgraded gadgets — phones, tablets, computers, T.Vs, appliances … Storage units are a thriving business, for all the overflow of large homes, growing larger.
But are our souls growing larger?
Don’t we shrink every time we turn away from the pain across the ocean,
or across the street?
We watch headline news, men of the Cross, kneeling, their hands tied behind their backs. Blades shine in the hands of their captors, standing behind, ready to show the world how powerful they are. What they will not tolerate in the “new world” they are intent on creating. The price of being other.
After heads roll, and we flinch and turn away, the blades march on, raping, destroying, killing, crushing, stomping out any life they judge unworthy.
Hitler was a schoolboy compared to these.
When news of Nazi persecution of Jews leaked out, it fell on deaf ears. The first pictures of the death camps were deemed fakes, flukes. No one could do something so inhuman. Jews who fled the approaching German machine found little refuge in a comfortable world who couldn’t be bothered with the refuse of that little strutting man.
Until he threatened too close to home.
How close to home does it need to get for us to care about those being crushed now?
ISIS, ISIL
I admit, I haven’t know what I could do about a threat so large. I pray for the persecuted and displaced, for those who have lost their loved ones, but what is that among so many?
Ann Voskamp asked herself, and went to see. Please click on the links below to read her postings. Find out what is really happening beyond the sensational news.
And see how you can make a difference, without a trip to Iraq.
Be the difference. The hands and feet of Jesus to love a broken heart, body, people.
Glimpse of Peace 
Jane, my heart is thudding and I’ve broken a sweat. I just read Ann’s post. And I felt it. Everywhere.
“We can talk of love all we want when we’re living in our own ghettos of like-mindedness. But we only get to live love when we actually go walk to The Other, where folks think and live something other than we do. We only get to stop talking about love and actually live it when we stop waiting for someone else to do it and reach our own hand out.”
I am just Beyond by her extended hands and heart. These words are the 100,000 heartbeats of each day. These words, that incite us to act instead of just being acted upon, are sacred. These words. Oh, these words.
What a beautiful call to all of us, to cross the lines that separate and breathe inclusion over exclusion.
We are ALL connected. Even those with whom we most vehemently disagree are our brothers and sisters.
I will be digesting these words for some time, love.
Thank you for them. And, as always, for your own.
With heart,
Dani
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Thank you for reading and digesting. When we serve up our hearts in words, it is a blessing to have them welcomed and savored.
As we do a dear friend,
such as you, precious Dani.
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Thank you for this powerful prophetic challenge, Sister…and for the link to an amazing person who embraced a call in utter simplicity saying “Send me”.
I was struck by one objection that readers may be likely to raise in their hearts as they read of this…that of logistics and money to go, jobs and lives that hold onto us like scaffolds hold buildings under construction and renovation…
…Well, the rejoinder to that is you do not need to leave the country to go find “the Other” to minister to. In fact, the odds are great you don’t need to leave your city, and possibly not even leave your neighborhood…go down to your child’s school, and observe…watch who walks, head down, arms pulled in around herself because no one else is there to hold them…watch the sparkly ones, and look deep into their eyes and see the dead pools lurking that speak of being possessors of all things and no heart-love or soul-touch from those that ought to be doing that.
Or…go to your local unemployment center, or your local social services center, or your local youth center, or the local LGTBQ center if your city has one.
If you are reading this, fellow readers, then my exhortation is that the call to be sent is imminently answerable!
The real logistical concern is first a logistics of the heart.
❤
Charissa
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Charissa, thank you for fleshing out “across the street.” I can’t say everything in one post, and I love how my readers fill in those places for me! (You say it with awesome passion and eloquence.)
I hope everyone didn’t miss the ending . . . that we aren’t all called to fly someplace, but can donate to that specific need through the ministry Ann featured, the Preemptive Love Coalition.
I believe really loving is caring for the Other far away AND close by. In the story known as The Good Samaritan, Jesus turns the question of “Who I should help?” to “WHO AM I IF I DON’T HELP, wherever I encounter the need?”
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Jane, that’s a powerful post. Have you thought of asking Missions & Outreach to help with any funding? All the while, the latest Pelican writes about Redeemer’s building plans. Your phrase “what is that among so many” brought me back to Leo’s and my visit in ’86 to the land of my birth. When we visited Old Delhi, there was a child lying in the street, dying. And what was the exact remark from our taxi driver but “….what is that among so many”. Blessings, Colleen (Ruffini) Date: Sun, 24 May 2015 19:27:50 +0000 To: memsahib@outlook.com
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You have an eloquent story and the heart to go with it, Colleen. Perhaps you could bring it to M&O?
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