Somewhere in the World

Preface

I wrote the following piece in January of this year and as I was going through some of my journal entries yesterday, I came across it. It struck an all too familiar chord.

It’s easy to forget that a world outside of our own exists; we’re all so consumed with our individual affairs that there doesn’t seem to be enough time in a day to consider the worries that plague other people or places. In adopting this attitude, we have neglected one powerful truth-

We are the world.

We know these famous lyrics from the well known eighties song, though I’m afraid we never fully connected to their meaning. Perhaps we did, and simply chose to ignore them. Whatever the case, the time is now for us to acknowledge that we are innately joined to every part of this earth. If this idea was suffocated in the past, we must revive it without delay, for the welfare of all is in its hands.

A part of your fate lives in me; mine, in you.

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Today, I read a letter from a mother who lost her baby boy. Her pain was my own as my eyes fell upon every stinging word of her expression. Immediately after reading her letter, I was overcome with guilt and shame. I hadn’t been praying for her. I thought, maybe if I had been more diligent in my prayers that I could have somehow spared her some pain. Maybe we could have shared it, had I been seeking God more fiercely for her.

I’ve never met this woman, and we mostly likely will never know one another physically, but my soul clung to hers as I read her letter. My spirit hugged hers and prayed to her for forgiveness.

“I wasn’t praying for you,” I told her.

I watched my mother lose her son over a year ago and I remember how desperately I longed to pull the pain from her spirit and bear it myself. Sorrow is not meant to be taken on by one person.

Today, the rain may not fall upon me as it falls upon you, but I can endure the storm with you, as we pray for the sun to show its face. There is no justification for a single soul to face hardships in solitude- not so long as we have one another.

If I have survived the day unscathed by the sting of life, it was for me to lift my face toward heaven in prayer that you too, would be spared. If I am absent when you are unable to be present for yourself, who shall stand in proxy for you?

There is never a time we should cease in our prayer for one another. Though my pain may not be your own today, tomorrow is a new dawn. Today I may carry the sorrow for you, but I can’t hold on to it forever.  We must carry our pain together.  We must distribute this world’s sorrow evenly among our backs. It is the only way we will overcome the tragedy of this world.

 

Let us not wait for tragedy to strike to cry out in prayer. Let our tears of peace water this Earth daily.