Pray for the World.
It’s a terrible thing, but I don’t feel like writing about engineering today. Or writing about writing. I feel like writing about reality, about the lives I heard were lost on Friday.
Writing is my most cultivated talent. I write, hoping that my message may one day influence the world for the better, even though I spend time thinking up horrible things to include to pit my characters against.
But there are things in the world so terrible, we dare not truly capture them in fiction.
Here in my comfortable home, I can shut off the TV, lock away the Internet, put down my phone, and retreat to my imaginary world, where I am safe but my characters are not. That’s okay. They’re not real people.
Whatever your beliefs, don’t forget the real people and the real struggles and heartbreak that’s going on, as the image below says, in all corners of the world. Even if you can do nothing for Paris, for Baghdad, or for Beirut, there are thousands more suffering souls near wherever you are, waiting for a kind word, a kind ear, or a kind deed. If you have no money to spare nor time nor things, then at the very least, give the world your open-minded attitude and your compassion.
!["It is not [only] Paris we should pray for. it is the world. It is a world in which Beirut, reeling from bombings two days before Paris, is not covered in the press. A world in which a bomb goes off at a funeral in Baghdad and not one person's status update says "Baghdad," because not one white person died in that fire. Pray for the world that blames a refugee crisis for a terrorist attack. That does not pause to differentiate between the attacker and the person running from the very same thing you are. Pray for a world where people walking across countries for months, their only belongings upon their backs, are told they have no place to go. Say a prayer for Paris by all means, but pray more, for the world that does not have a prayer for those who no longer have a home to defend. For a world that is falling apart in all corners, and not simply in the towers and cafes we find so familiar."](https://blog.shannoneichorn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/NotJustParis.png)
If you pray, pray for the terrible losses this past weak in bombings, shootings, and the everyday tragedies too small for national news. If you can, do what you can for the victims, their families, their neighbors, and their long journey to rebuilding their lives. And if you can’t, exercise your sympathy and keep an eye out for those who are hurting closer to home.
There is always a way to help.
