Heartburn

It's just after four in the morning and I am up with heartburn. When it gets this bad, sleep is simply not an option. Having heartburn in a locked jail cell in the middle of the night, with no prospect of getting relief until the morning, was perhaps the worst experience of my entire incarceration. It was complete torture. Gagging myself was the only option--but that was only a temporary cure that made the acid come back with a vengeance in the long run.

I am also up thinking about the woman who died yesterday in a car accident right outside my Church. I had just finished speaking before the entire congregation, when the all-too-familiar screeching of tires and crunching of metal came crashing through our ears. I rushed outside along with a cadre of other church-goers to see what had happened. She was hunched over the steering wheel with blood coming out of her mouth and ears.

Would we all be paralyzed by life if all of the suffering in the world happened right outside our Church windows? Is proximity the only thing that keeps us from feeling the true depth of human sorrow? Seeing is feeling. Not seeing, well...And we are excused if we do not see...and yet, what if we have missed the main part of the suffering in the world because we have in reality averted our eyes from it and erected walls against it?

And if we gag ourselves to find a moments respite from the pain...rather than find a real solution, then will it in the end come back to us with a vengeance?