“We’re discussing where we’re going to move,” my wife informed me as I walked into the living room. This grabbed my attention, because she had told me that we can’t move again until we’ve lived in our current house for at least ten years. That embargo doesn’t expire for three years.
I looked at my teenage daughter and back at Crystal. One of them clarified that with another world war on the horizon, we had to find a new country of residence. (For my non-local friends, we live near where the nuclear power plants of U.S. Navy ships and submarines are manufactured. So, this was a legitimate discussion.) Amused, I sat on the couch between them and checked off reasons why their choices wouldn’t work and then reasons why we weren’t in physical danger.
I cast my vote for Norway, Canada, and New Zealand, though, and went about my day. Internally, I thought, “Mental note: don’t book any flights that connect through Dubai anytime soon.”
A couple days later, my plane landed in Canada. I came up here for a few days to try to write the last few chapters of my book. The next day, I found an open desk at the bustling Vancouver Central Library. I scored one of the few double-sided desks without someone facing me. On the other side lay a few newspapers, and the covers gave my heart a pang.
A couple days earlier, I had been flippantly talking about how drone strikes and troop movements didn’t impact my safety. Today, I felt the coarseness of that line of thought, a sour aftertaste. Thousands of people lost friends and family members from retaliation. I didn’t know them. I certainly didn’t send any of them Christmas cards, but they are real people with real holes in their hearts.
My mind started down a path to other places in the news:
- Australia and its wildfires
- Puerto Rico and its earthquake
- capsized boats off Greece emptied of their now-drowned refugees
- American prisons with occupants sold into incarceration by at least one corrupt judge
That quick, insufficient tour by itself is a lot. Frankly, any one of those is a lot.
With cable news networks and the Internet, we now know more about the world’s suffering than any generation before us. Documentaries and long-form reporting offer us on deep dives past our ignorance. We know millions of girls and boys—as young as five years old—are sex slaves, some chained to walls between active service. We know children are imprisoned by indoor chainlink fences in steel buildings on our southern border. We know high schoolers are hunting their classmates instead of wild game. We know women are treated like cattle in dozens of countries. We know opioid addictions are destroying entire swaths of our country and that racism still makes men and women scared to do things white people do everyday without thinking.
We know. We know. We know.
After writing that last sentence, I walked past a vigil in a tiny park. Candles. Signs. A smartphone-size Iranian flag. Pictures of surprisingly-young, deceased Canadian diplomats. A petition.
I didn’t sign it. That felt disingenuous—not because I rooted for an assassination that resulted in retaliation but because of embarrassment. The cares of my life will probably choke out my empathetic prayers before I leave town. All I know to pray is for peace and comfort and other almost-impossible gifts I can’t personally give.
I am thankful, though, that I never have to ask Jesus to care. I’m grateful he never has to be informed of the situation. I expect he mourns more than we ever will over the choices those created in his image are making. Only he knows the potential lost with the lives that have ended, with the existences that have been stained. Only he knows what it was like before our physical planet groaned under the weight of our brokenness. Only he knows how amazing the redemption of this world will be.
In the meantime, we can dream. We can hope. We can hear the news and pray for those affected. We can ask for the Source of empathy to wrap his arms around the hurting. We can give to charities on the ground of each conflict or disaster. We can leverage the privilege of our safety to wish it for someone else.
