our responsibility.

Sometimes it can be discouraging to speak out a message of compassion and justice in the face of a world drowning in poverty, oppression, disease, hate, contempt, and surrender. Sometimes the issues just seem so big, so incredibly ugly. However, I am able to find refuge in a God who is BIGGER than all of these things, a God who has given us the responsibility for this planet (...and yes, that means both the people AND the environment! Hug the trees, people! ...figuratively, that is), but also, a God who has put all the resources and creativity to find solutions to these problems within us!!

A friend of mine found this quote from Martin Luther King - if you have a few minutes, read through it. There is some good inspiration to be found.

"A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look easily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the counties, and say: ‘This is not just.’ The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “this way of settling difference is not just.’ This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from re-ordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism and militarism. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors.

If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who posses power without compassion, might without morality and strength without sight.

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful struggle for a new world this is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history."

Martin Luther King