The Joy and Pain

'When I read about the way abandoned orphan girls in China are tied to their bed rails and left to starve and die in state-run orphanages, I am very nearly moved to tears. But a year later when a conversation with a friend reminds me of the article, I realize that I have not shed a tear, uttered a prayer or even given it thought since the day I put down that newspaper article. I can move from torture on the evening news to touchdowns on Monday Night Football with almost the same mental and emotional ease as my channel changer.

Of course, much of this is perfectly natural and probably healthy. I do not aspire to be someone with a psychotic fixation on evil and human suffering. It is a poorly lived life that cannot experience joy, peace, laughter, beauty and mirth depsite all the oppression and injustice that mars the goodness of God's creation. If the evening news or the morning paper keeps me from taking my wife to a movie, from laughing at my three-year-old daughter's stories or from enjoying the exhiliration of a bike ride on a crisp fall day, then something is surely out of balance.'

Good news about Injustice, Gary A. Haugen, IVP books, 1999. p. 38

He goes on to say that there is a way of developping a deep compassion for the world, which also translates into action. It is through hope. Hope that full and abundant life is not out of reach. Hope which avoids us getting immobilised by despair.

I found this really helpful. Quite often I end up feeling guilty that I live a life where I have not just a roof but a nice roof above my warm bed at a night, enjoy food and friendship and family and so many good things. And yet I have also heard and seen with my own eyes, people who don't have these things. How to hold these two things together? How do you carry these stories in your heart and not become hopeless? How to avoid being compassion-less and callous but not veer towards what Haugen calls a 'psychotic fixation on evil and human suffering'?

I don't have the answer! But I like his point that it is a 'poorly lived life' which can't experience the full range of human emotions. Living richly then is part of the answer. Living life in all its fulness. The Joy and the Pain.