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RSSLife Goes on as Usual
By The Rev. Barbara Cawthorne Crafton
10/9/2005
When the blast of the ruthless was like a winter rainstorm, the noise of aliens like heat in a dry place, you subdued the heat with the shade of clouds; the song of the ruthless was stilled. -- Isaiah 25:4b-5
While the rains fell and the wind blew and the waters rose on the American Gulf Coast, life went on as usual in the rest of the world. Of course, "as usual" means different things in different places. In Africa, for instance, "usual" can have many meanings.
Liberians are still recovering from more than a decade of civil violence. Only now can farmers even think of beginning again. Schools in this highly education-conscious society are only now reopening -- the war has cost many young people the entirety of what would have been their school years.
Episcopal Relief and Development supports a new community health clinic at the Bromley Mission School in Monrovia, an Anglican school which has educated generations of Liberian girls, including the current First Lady of Liberia. Now, dozens of its girls are war orphans.
The displaced children in the camps where ERD ministers in Darfur have been occupied doing what all children love to do: drawing with colored crayons. But their drawings are of the rampaging Janjaweed on their horses, sweeping through the villages, of the children's families cornered in their houses, crying out, their mouths round Os of terror and pain; of people on fire, people dead on the ground, government helicopters hovering in the air.
Nobody has told them what to draw. They just draw what they've seen.
And life goes on as usual in Botswana. But then life there is so much about death -- a third of the population is living with HIV/AIDS. Life expectancy for men is 35 years. For women, it's 25 years. Better things are hoped for, with ERD's support, but right now it's hospice care. And a day care center for AIDS orphans. So that life can go on as usual.
Oh, nothing is as usual! Nothing remains, for long, as God intends it: peaceful, sufficient, fruitful. Death comes in an instant, comes to people already beaten down by life. Or it creeps toward them, inch by starving inch, cell by dying cell. Despair beckons us all with its bony finger, and we cannot help but see.
But God is not about our despair. Despair is the enemy, the tool of our undoing, and our God is all about our coming together. If death creeps toward us, inch by inch, we meet it with strong faith and decisive action, faith as strong as death is ruthless. Action as deep and broad as our giving can make it: the more, the better, wherever there is need.
