Compassion is the sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it’s like to live inside somebody else’s skin. It is the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too.
– Frederick Buechner
Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the problems of the world. Reading the news can be gut-wrenching. And after all, I am only one person, so what can I really do? As I write, fifteen members of our congregation are packing their bags with puzzles, magic markers, stickers, balloons, laptops, and coloring books to take with us to Tanzania. But the poverty in Tanzania is vast and mind-boggling so it is easy to feel as though we are powerless to really change the world.
Recently, I ran across a mention of a small protest held in Germany in the freezing cold of February of 1943. A group of mothers and wives marched outside a building where their husbands and sons were being held by the Nazis. The mothers were not Jewish. But their husbands and sons were Jewish. It was the only demonstration held on behalf of the Jews in wartime Germany. I tremble at the courage of those mothers who stood up to the armed guards in front of the building where their sons and husbands were detained. These women were ultimately successful. Their vigil made international news, and German authorities backed down because they feared that the tide of the populace could quickly shift against their regime. I guess they were afraid of the mothers! The husbands and sons were released and exempted from deportation to Auschwitz.
The memory of these mothers, protesting with no blueprint or community organizing playbook, reminds me that sometimes God does work miracles through a small band of people who act from compassion. No one of us can do everything. But all of us can do something.
Grace and Peace,
Carla
