IVP - Strangely Dim

This is a great blessing. Thanks for sharing it.

I find myself getting angry and teary when I hear news stories about people suffering injustice, particularly children. I heard a story on NPR about children being abducted in India, the horrible things they go through and how their parents, who are already poor, borrow large sums of money to try and find their kids. I was so angry and I cried all the way home praying for God to do something.

The difficult part is the acting. I have very little idea of what I can do to help. The things I am doing seem so small in comparison to the great need. So I do the little I know to do and keep praying. And hopefully, through prayer others will be helped and my heart will be tuned to opportunities God may provide for me to act.

What?!! You mean there's a better way than to just instinctively shake off all uncomfortable feelings? ...That there is a higher call than, "Don't worry; be happy?"

But what good can I possibly do, since I am just one insignificant little fish in this vast ocean?

I would really like to explore the concept of solidarity more deeply than I have. It was an incredibly important theme when I was a kid, with the pope reflecting theologically about the workers' solidarity movement in Poland, which ultimately contributed to the collapse of Communism in Europe. I was just a kid in Des Moines, but somehow I was bound both by identity and by responsibility to the struggle taking place across the world. Prayer strikes me as a pretty profound act of solidarity, but especially in a globalized economy there are undoubtedly ways to behave in solidarity with the poor and the oppressed, even out here in the ridiculously wealthy suburbs.