Good morning…
In generations past, we simply do not know. We were unaware of violence in Colorado Springs, unaffected by grieving in Paris, and untouched by senseless attacks inside movie theaters and sacred schools, aboard vulnerable airplanes and on faraway street corners. Now, we know of brutal tragedy almost instantly and we watch the images repeated obsessively before our TV viewing eyes.
In 1955, eight years before I was born, Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote: “Today a kind of planetal point of view has burst on mankind. The world is rumbling and erupting in ever-widening circles around us. The tensions, conflicts and sufferings even in the outermost circle touch us all, reverberate in all of us. We cannot avoid these vibrations.” Anne continued, “We are asked today to feel compassionately for everyone in the world; to digest intellectually all the information spread out in public print; to implement in action every ethical impulse aroused in our hearts and minds. The inter-relatedness of the world links us constantly with more people than our hearts can hold,” (p. 123, Gift from the Sea).
Since Lindbergh penned this truth sixty years ago, our interconnecting circles have widened even further. We can not possibly carry on the old tradition of taking chicken soup to every sick person we know, being “koolaid mom” to all the thirsty children in the world, and marrying, bearing kids with, and caring to old age all the pressing needs tugging on our hearts. So, what are we to do? Overwhelmed, what are we to do?
We do one task, one task alone. We bond with the Creator of the universe, daily responding to God’s whisper: “Remain in Me, and I [will remain] in you. Just as no branch can bear fruit by itself without remaining in the vine, neither can you [bear fruit, producing evidence of your faith] unless you remain in Me. I am the Vine; you are the branches. The one who remains in Me and I in him bears much fruit, for [otherwise] apart from Me [that is, cut off from vital union with Me] you can do nothing,” John 15:4-5 (AMP).
As we admit our overwhelming powerlessness, our personal ability to do absolutely nothing, we simply remain in vital union with the LORD, who bears fruit on our branch to feed hungry needs,
Sue
