for today...

Reprinted from www.bruderhof.com

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You are probably striving to build yourself an identity in your work, out of your work and your witness. You are using it, so to speak, to protect yourself against nothingness, annihilation. That is not the right use of your work. All the good that you will do will come not from you but from the fact that you have allowed yourself, in the obedience of faith, to be used for God's love. Think of this more, and gradually you will be free from the need to prove yourself, and you can be more open to the power that will work through you without your knowing it.

The great thing after all is to live, not to pour out your life in the service of a myth; and we turn the best things into myths. If you can get free from the domination of causes and just serve Christ's truth, you will be able to do more and will be less crushed by the inevitable disappointments. Because I see nothing whatever in sight but much disappointment, frustration, and confusion.

Our real hope, then, is not in something we think we can do, but in God who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see. If we can do his will, we will be helping in this process. But we will not necessarily know all about it beforehand.

- Thomas Merton

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the great divide...

If you want some sobering reading, read the latest UN Human Development summary: "Aid, trade and security in an unequal world..."

Every hour more than 1,200 children die away from the glare of media attention. This is equivalent to three tsunamis a month, every month, hitting the world’s most vulnerable citizens—its children. The causes of death will vary, but the overwhelming majority can be traced to a single pathology: poverty. Unlike the tsunami, that pathology is preventable.

Preventable. Not a natural disaster, not an act of God. Poverty does not need to exist. Things seem like they are getting worse instead of better -- the divide growing greater between the rich and the poor. Or maybe it just feels greater to me -- as I sit in country ranked #7 trying to reconcile the loves in my life... $3 cups of coffee and people living on less than $1 a day in countries #176 and #177... Doesn't add up.

And the unpreventable...? Watching news coverage of tsunamis, hurricanes and earthquakes, I realize even in natural disasters, it's always the poor that suffer most...

I had to do a search on CNN.com this morning to find earthquake coverage. That's how quickly it's dropped off the face of the news. But this weekend their special report on the "Faces of the Earthquake" broke my heart. If I were them... I might have wished to be among the dead instead of the survivors. I watch the rain turn into snow outside my window and wonder what that feels like under only a blanket in the mountains of Pakistan...

One country still in the news is Liberia -- last year's country #177 (rock bottom) on the Human Development Index. This year, it's dropped off the scale due to insufficient data. But last week, Liberians went to the polls for their first presidential election since the end of 14 years of civil war. And last month, our Mercy Ship Anastasis docked for the second time in Liberia's capital of Monrovia to assist in the country's rebuilding efforts with much-needed medical and development aid. God bless the new leader of the world's poorest nation and keep the peace...

I struggle with my own responsibility in the midst of this disproportion...

The first step to crossing the divide is awareness...

:: "Every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity, an obligation; every possession, a duty."- John D.Rockefeller Jr.