Last night before just before house church a member calls to say he is running late because another member of the house church, who has been coming for about a month, has been beaten up and is in the hospital. Going home I sit late into the night talking with a friend who has the pain of loss etched upon his face. Today at lunch I visit my friend from house church in the hospital. His face is puffy from facial fractures, his eye blackened, and he needs to occasionally allow himself more drips of morphine. Returning to work, in the parking lot, a culinary student who is sometimes in the library has been just wheelchaired to a family member’s car, suffering from what looks to be like a seizure. In my office on the library cart we have just received a new edition of an encyclopedia on domestic violence, an entire encyclopedia. In fact, we have encyclopedic knowledge just about on any ill you might think of.

All of these things bring to mind a post from the old blog. Also, I begin to ponder why I am not feeling overwhelmed by these things today, as I so often do by seemingly smaller, more personal things, as I can sometimes when I really ponder the suffering of the world. I do not have a good answer for this except that perhaps I have already been reflecting on some of the answers I present in the old post, and this:

Last night at house church, 15 or so members pray for their brother, make plans to visit him, to take care of him. Last night I get up from the couch, from my computer and sit on the back porch and listen more than I talk. Today at lunch, my friend’s aunts are there, whom he has not seen for a long, long time, but also his landlord, myself and another member of my house church and a pastor of our church, a man from Togo, Africa. My pastor reads a Psalm of David which he wrote as he suffered from his enemies, and suddenly it springs to life in ways that it never has before. He reads and gently encourages a man with whom he would have no natural affinity save for the church. The girl with the seizure has been helped to her car by three campus staff.

Returning to my office, I reflect that, though some reject Christianity because they ask how God could allow deep suffering and heinous evil to exist in the world (which, it should be acknowledged, is a serious challenge us Christians must face which does not have easy or clear answers), I believe in God because the Bible tells me that it was not always this way, that it is, indeed, an outrage, and that one day God will set it all right, and that resonates strongly with my heart. Also, Christianity is the religion which influenced the foundation of much of the charitable bent of our society (even the bits that have gotten wrong-headed) which influenced people to set up the first hospitals, which has strongest the philosophical underpinnings to care for the weakest and poorest in society, to establish their rights, to protect them from harm. The collective members of the church out-Oprah Oprah, every year, building numerous hospitals and schools and feeding the poor and helping people out of illiteracy. Of course us practitioners of Christianity must still be far, far, far, far better in practicing its precepts, yet still we can go forward with a working faith which reminds us with each act of service we give or receive that God is setting the world to right. This gives me hope within the suffering.

If you pray, you might pray for the recovery of my friend, for his physical and psychological and financial needs.