Violent Fire in the Works

I didn't do anything to celebrate the 4th of July tonight. I was exhausted from running the Peachtree this morning and from having awaken sometime around 5:30-7:30AM every single day for the past 3 months. (Literally.) When I heard the fireworks starting to boom as I was laying in bed (see, I really didn't do anything), I had a set of very unexpected reactions. I thought of and pictured the explosion of bombs in Baghdad and of the shootings all throughout the West Bank. I imagined my Sudanese clients, who are now grown men, as children when the war in Darfur began - I pictured them running frantically towards safety and away from attacks from extremists. I pictured men being shot to death with AK-47s in Iraq, just like Basim told me. I saw visions of corrupt men in uniforms in Burma and Bhutan banging down doors and ... hurting people. Hardly a pretty picture of freedom and independence, right? Right.

I don't think I expected to experience as much spiritual warfare as I seem to be experiencing throughout my work with these refugees. I hear stories of racial, ethnic, and religious persecution; of abuse; of fleeing disease, slavery, and certain death. And suddenly, it seems like the weight of what I have heard and the faces of those who have experienced all this is smacking my heart around. I don't tell anyone about it because no one (okay, almost no one) wants to hear it. People are interested up to a point, and beyond that, it's too hard, too dark, too devastating.

... It's not just stories from and about the refugees. The stories and realities of the women and children caught up in the sex trafficking and sexual entertainment industry are at least as hard to stomach.

I know I'm in the right place, doing what I'm being asked to do. But it's hard. And sometimes, especially tonight, I feel alone.

This is one of the reasons I have started running so much.
I find refuge in running.
The world makes sense, if only for a little while, when I run.
I find a kind of peace when I run.


There is much evil in this world. I stumbled across a journal entry from 2006 entitled, "Why Is The World So Cold?" I wanted to know why suffering, why violence, why evil ... today I ask the same questions, though if I am honest with myself and God, I think I already have some of the answers. They're just hard. It's a hard, violent fire in the working. But there is Light ahead. I know it.