March 16th, 2011 | |
Posted in church
I have a personal theory about people serving other people in pain… We are most uncomfortable because we are scared to death that what happens to others will happen to us.
In other words, we avoid our friends who have cancer because their bald heads remind us that we’re vulnerable to cancer, too. We avoid grieving families because looking at their loss (of a child, a spouse, a parent) means that we, too, could face that loss. We avoid funerals because we know that the next funeral could be our own.
We think, “I don’t know the right words to say!” and “I could never survive this!”
I have been in ministry long enough to be able to put aside my own fears about cancer, losing loved ones, and losing my own life. I got it. I’m going to lose those things. And no funeral, no bald head, no sitting with someone in loss is going to make it come faster or slower for me.
I think I understand the devastation of natural disasters. I preached a sermon on the day that the Indian Ocean Tsunami hit Indonesia, and remember the horror of more than 225,000 people dying. I remember when Haiti suffered the earthquake and as many as 220,000 people died and 1.5 million were made homeless. I have watched Haiti as it attempts to recover from the earthquake, and feel the loss of all those individuals.
Somehow, Japan is different. Well, the tsunami and the earthquake don’t feel significantly different, but the nuclear meltdown is different for me. It might be because I was born in Japan, in a suburb of Tokyo, when my father served in the Air Force there. It might be because I live now just 50 miles away from a nuclear power plant. It may be that I watched The Day After in the 80′s.
So I watch the Japanese video in horror. I pray for those heroes who are working trying to contain the cores. I pray for the families around the reactors, for the fear of leaving their homes and the fear of staying in them. I pray for the generations to come who will face this devastation for many years to come. I pray for the government officials of Japan, that they might help solve these problems. I pray for the generosity of sister nations who will help with presence, rescues, and resources. I pray, especially for the grandmothers and grandfathers, for the mothers and fathers, and for the children.
Tags:
fear,
Japan,
ministry 
