Some days it's pretty easy to forget the brokenness of the world. Fall is just around the corner and with pumpkin-flavored everything and favorite sweaters being brought out, life feels cozy and safe and nostalgic. Pleasant, sun-shiny days, kids playing outside, life looks on the outside like things are just as good and wonderful as they could be. And please understand, that these are blessings. It is wonderful, blissful to watch my children enjoy outside while having some quiet thoughts to myself. However, it doesn't take much for it all to come back.
No, my marriage isn't falling apart. I don't have a loved one slowly being wrestled away from their physical body. It's something deeper than those things. I can't quite pinpoint it, but God is moving and refining right now. I look at my alma mater and while I don't how, I see is dissolving into gossip for the locals and a stain on the graduates and student. I look at my church and see it unraveling due to things we're not talking about. It seems that all around me life as I knew it is coming undone and I don't know how or why.
It is times like these when I'm thankful that God has left some things stable--my family is in good health and my husband and I are happy with each other. God is good and knows that I am so frail. He is bringing me through difficult baby months with little girl so that now I see glimmers of sunshine.
However, I look at her and think of the hundreds of girls kidnapped in Nigeria who have yet to be found. Why hasn't there been any progress? Maybe I've been fed too much propaganda, but it seems to me that with a great big powerhouse player as America that surely we would at least know where the girls were and be in the process of rescuing them. And how many more reporters must be killed by ISIS in order for us to snipe every last member? Do we not have the manpower? Do those in charge simply not care? What's the problem?
Ok, truly, I know the answer to that last one--such a Sunday school answer--the problem is that we live in a fallen world. I understand that. I'm part of that broken world and sometimes it strikes me just how far we've fallen.
