Everything I Know About What Is Wrong

You could give somebody a briefing on about twelve situations.

Not headlines. Detail. You know the history of one of them going back forty years, and you know why the obvious solution is not a solution, and you know the names of two people who are trying and what has happened to them.

None of the twelve is anywhere you have been. You will not go to any of them. There is not one of them where anything you do this week will register at all.

And you did not accumulate this out of morbid interest. You started reading properly because looking away felt like a kind of cowardice, and because the people in those places are people, and somebody ought to at least know.

That instinct is decent and it is why you have twelve.

Here is what it has become. You carry them. Not as a project or a campaign, because there is nothing to campaign about that you have the standing to campaign about, but as a weight, present in the background, all the time.

And it has begun to affect the near things. You were slower with your neighbor last week than you would have been three years ago, and it was not indifference; it was that there was already something occupying the part of you that would have gone out to her.

What this page will not do

This is the last category and its rule is that nothing gets added, so there is nothing here to read, join, or begin.

I am not going to tell you to stop caring. That is what people say and it is not available to you, and it would not be right if it were.

I am not going to give you a cause to focus on. Choosing one of the twelve would be another thing to carry with the added weight of having chosen against eleven.

I am not going to tell you to give money, though if you already do, keep doing it, and that is not the subject of this page.

And I am not going to tell you the knowing was wrong. It came out of refusing to look away, which is a better instinct than most people have.

You are not callous for setting some of this down. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, Psalm 34:18, and nearness is not increased by carrying more, and the Holy Spirit is on that hillside with somebody who has been informed for three years.

The verse is spoken over an earth in uproar

There is a line in Psalm 46 that is usually read as an instruction about quiet time and is nothing of the kind in its own setting.

Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth.Psalm 46:10

Read what surrounds it. That psalm has the earth being removed, the mountains carried into the sea, the waters roaring, the nations raging and the kingdoms moved.

It is a psalm about global catastrophe. It is not a psalm about a person having a difficult week.

And into that, the sentence: Be still.

The word behind it carries the sense of letting go, dropping the hands, ceasing from an effort. It is spoken to people who are watching the world come apart, and what they are told to drop is not their concern for it, which nobody could drop, but their grip.

And then the reason: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth. Not: it is not as bad as you think. Not: those situations will resolve.

The reason given is who He will be, in exactly those places, in exactly that uproar, with or without your holding.

You are not the one holding those twelve places together. Scripture says be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, Psalm 46:10, and the stillness is commanded over a world in genuine uproar rather than over a quiet room, and the Holy Spirit is at work in twelve situations that have never once depended on your attention.

What the informed load is doing

It is not producing anything. That is the thing to look at, and it is not an argument for indifference.

Compassion that can act is a good and necessary thing. It is why people give, go, campaign and write letters, and every one of those is real.

Compassion that cannot act does not convert into anything. It sits, and it accumulates, and after three years it occupies a fixed portion of a person which is then not available for the things that are actually in front of them.

Your neighbor last week was the evidence.

That is not a moral failure and it does not mean you love the twelve too much. It means attention is finite, and that a load which cannot be discharged displaces one which can.

You are not able to carry everything and everyone. Scripture says every man shall bear his own burden, Galatians 6:5, and it stands beside the instruction to bear one another's, and the two together describe a limit rather than a hierarchy of caring, and the Holy Spirit has never once assigned a woman on a hillside twelve countries.

What is set down

Not the caring, and not the giving if you give.

The daily briefing. The keeping up. The sense that you must know the current state of each of the twelve, which is what has turned concern into an obligation with a refresh rate.

One evening with none of it. That is the whole instruction and there is nothing after it.

No news, no updates, nothing from any of the twelve, for one evening. And nothing put in its place: no better cause, no book, no decision about how you will handle this from now on.

You will feel, at some point in that evening, that something is happening that you do not know about.

Something is. Something always was, including in the years before you were informed, and it went on being true in every one of those twelve places at every hour of your life before you had heard of them.

You are not required to be current. Scripture says sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, Matthew 6:34, and the sufficiency is a boundary drawn around one day by somebody entirely realistic about how much trouble there is, and the Holy Spirit is not asking anybody to hold twelve.