His Love Is Fierce, His Love Is Strong, It Is Furious

I had a sudden twinge in my memory tonight of something I wrote on my trip to Brazil in 2008, and had to run and find my journal. It's not been a good week, and I don't only mean for myself. It was the last half that I recalled, but when I read the whole entry, the context of it also struck me. This is what I wrote:

(March 2, 2008, Garca, Brazil)
"This morning I rode the bus to church next to a girl who was sold into slavery for fifty cents at the age of eight by her own parents. What do you do with that?

I think we are all given our own hell to survive in life, and we all think for a moment that it couldn't be any worse. But for these children...these children have seen hell. And it renders me speechless.

Oh, help me love."

There is so much injustice in this world; both in our personal worlds and in the world as the big picture. SO. MUCH. Pain is all relative, none of us hurt more or less than others, but we all DO hurt. And that pain we feel? That thing that affects us? It often, if not always, makes absolutely no sense at all. People get sick. People die. People are treated unjustly. Animals get sick. Animals die. Animals are treated unjustly. Bad things happen to good people. Important things fall apart. Circumstances and people and decisions and events JUST DON'T MAKE SENSE.

So what do we do about? How can we fix it? CAN we fix it? I'll tell you this much: we cannot change it. We can change how we accept it. We can change how we approach it. We can even sometimes change letting it happen again. But...we can't change IT. We can't change the fact that we have felt and will feel pain. We can only change ourselves, by examining what it DID to us, what it did to others, what it did to the world.

My point here, my friends, is that last line that my naive mind managed to muster up while my mouth was speechless at pure horror:

"Oh, help me love."

That's what we do. We love. We love God, we love others, we love ourselves. It's that simple. We freaking love the hell out of each other. Love covers over a multitude of sins. Love heals, and love prevents. We don't hate, we don't judge, we don't lash out, and we are not cruel. We love. And that love that we were gifted with to be able to give to others and to ourselves....well, it conquers all. It doesn't erase the bad, but it writes itself all over it and it stops more from happening. Love. In that bold, dark thing called injustice, unfairness, senselessness, hatefulness, whatever word you'd like to use....we love. We just...love.

Go and love...