Last night as I drove home from work I listened to NPR's "All Things Considered" as I do almost every night. I joined the broadcast already in the midst of a story from Dujiangyan, a city in China devastated by the recent earthquake.
Melissa Block's voice came through my radio speakers, quiet, subdued and often shaking with emotion. Two people, a couple, a young man in his early thirties and a young woman in her mid-twenties were frantically seeking help to locate their two year old son and his grandparents who were in their apartment when the earthquake hit on Monday morning. It had been two days and no one had yet searched the building rubble.
The loss of this family and so many others was brought home so clearly, far more clearly than any other story I have seen or heard. The simplicity, the sparseness, the pauses, the quaver in Melissa Block's voice accompanied by the sounds of the heavy machinery and the frantic, raw voices of the grieving family are crushing, stabbing, aching. So many losses these days, in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; the ongoing violence in Israel, Palestine, Lebanon; the unbelievable losses in Burma's cyclone. I don't know anymore how to process these great, grievous losses to these individuals, families, nations and all of us who share this world.
I ache for all of us and I fear the impact and effect of despair. I am a great believer in strength through adversity. I am one of the people who find they are at their best, accomplish more and greater things when challenged, when my back is against the wall. But sometimes the ache is such that you can do no more than curl in on yourself, cling to your loved ones if you are lucky enough to still have them. And pray.
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