Interruption: Praying for people near and far

I imagine that it hasn’t missed anyone’s notice who reads this blog that apart from the Fanstravaganza event, it’s been a rough week on Planet Earth. I believe and hope that laughing or smiling or thinking about Richard Armitage and his work helps a bit in dealing with these things, but of course, this blog is hardly the most important thing affecting us these days.

For me: Japan was much on my mind, both abstractly, and as a concrete issue, as I have a colleague there who’d already suffered a family tragedy (he and his family are okay, but watching with concern what is going on around them). Events in Japan distract us from the political struggles in North Africa and the Middle East, which in turn, the news media — the people who make a big, but also a scary, manipulative contribution to our sense that we are all bound up in this together — tell us, are distracting us at a bad time from an impending governmental crisis in Pakistan. At this moment of fiscal insecurity, plenty of big problems in the United States and the state of Texas where I work and the state of Wisconsin where most of my loved ones are — and the outcomes I hope for and those I hope don’t transpire — are occupying my free time. Then there are the personal issues, the things that are bigger than we can manage on our own, but which we don’t talk about when we’re blogging about Richard Armitage, sometimes precisely because it’s the experience of blogging that helps us deal with our lives. These things also require prayerful attention: the lost people we hope  to find, the sick people we hope will be healed, the suffering people we hope to comfort. I know I’m not the only one who has these issues in Armitageworld, which I means I know that readers of this blog have them, too. In light of our own personal matters, sometimes issues in the world strike us harder for particular reasons or we have to neglect them in favor of resolving problems close to home, but the big catastrophes happen nonetheless.

In the last years of my life, when it often seemed that everything was going wrong, I found increasingly that the only prayer I could pray for myself was “thy will be done” and the only prayer I could pray for others was “let those who are suffering be comforted.” I had to let go of thinking I could control anything by worrying about it.  And then I had to do what I could to deal with the problem of the moment.

I don’t have anything more to say than that, except that if you are currently among the suffering, I hope that you will be comforted. And that if you can, you will act to comfort others who are suffering in whatever way you are called to do so, whether that’s personally, financially, or with your time and energy. Don’t discount what you can do as too little. A donation to a relief organization helps the homeless — or helps make up the budget for another area of crisis when the charitable attention of the public is heavily focused on a particular crisis area. But it doesn’t have to be money. Even a friendly smile or a kind word to someone who’s suffering can make a difference in his day. And I firmly believe that prayer helps, too. Thinking of each other is not nothing.

Ultimately, we fail at it, because we are not perfect, but please, let us try to be as kind to each other as we can.

 

~ by Servetus on March 16, 2011.