Obsessing

It all started, I think, when I was a child, with Ulf Oldenburg and his fiery eyes and vivid persecution stories. I would lie in bed cold with fear and horror, thinking of Christians "behind the Iron Curtain" being tortured in a hundred different ways, and imagine myself in similar suffering someday.

The weight of human suffering seems to be something that accumulates in my head. Happy stories can come and go, but terrible stuff sticks. Every time we drive to the Midwest I imagine those poor pioneers, especially the women, crossing Wyoming with their covered wagons and I just about can't stand it that here I am breezing along at 75 mph, in air conditioning yet.

When I drive to Emily's I imagine the wagon trains crossing the mountains and having to ditch their precious heirloom furniture, and at Tombstone Pass I always think of the teenaged boy who is buried there and what his parents must have suffered. [The wagon train had just climbed to the top of the pass and they were there resting I guess. They saw a deer, and this boy wanted to shoot it, so he reached into the wagon and pulled the gun toward himself, not knowing that something was caught on the trigger, and he shot and killed himself. His tombstone is there somewhere, hence the name of the pass.]

Holocaust stories give me nightmares, especially since we visited Majdanek in Poland and saw the gas chambers and thousands of shoes. I see trains go by here and I think of all those people shuttled off in freight cars to die.

I would not make a good counselor because I would get emotionally involved in everyone's abuse stories, and when I hear of a case like this, of a little Afghan girl having to support her family, I can't stand it because there's nothing I can DO. And of course then there are chilling stories of injustice in Yemen from my sister and sad stories of sickness and death from our friends in Kenya.

Then there are orphans and wars and the persecuted church of course, and obviously I could go on and on because human suffering doesn't seem to exhaust itself and with the vast supply of information at my fingertips there's a constant stream of suffering-stories to add to the pile in my obsessive mind.

The Bible tells us to remember the poor, to be compassionate, to remember those in bonds as though bound with them. But how do you keep it from getting overwhelming. I wonder, how much would I have known about if I had been, say, Dorcas in the book of Acts. Probably not much besides what went on in the neighborhood, and that was within her power to do something about, so she sewed coats and garments for the widows and orphans.

Hmmmm. A lesson there, perhaps.

Quote of the Day: [which has nothing to do with suffering]
"I try to get a bunch of different kinds of ramen noodles so I get a balanced diet."
--Matt