Forest for the Trees

I can barely see the rooftops today. We woke to an eerie, orange haze that has invaded our city. Eyes were rubbed, window panes swiped at with the heel of a hand, and the sulfuric haze remained. Whatever it is, the annual spring windstorms from Mongolia, or the pollution being pushed in en mass from a neighboring city, it's not the kind of thing you're craving in March.

It seems like most things around me these days are covered in a cloudy haze, one that weighs heavy on my already melancholy mind. I'm leaving for Egypt on the trip of a lifetime in a few days, but I feel kind of blah about it. I look at the children mangled about  my ankles and all I can see are the issues, in myself and in them. I notice the cupboard doors that are falling apart and the drawer that always catches. I see the broken tiles, the burnt out light bulbs, the polluted skies and endless rows of dirty high rise apartments.

But I get too lost in my glumness. I know the weather will turn. And I know I'm not alone. In two weeks we will be remembering the saddest day in the history of humanity, the day the Son of Man was slain for the sins of the world. I was thinking a lot this week about the Man of Sorrows. He does not always give answers, though there are answers. But he always gives himself.

My little its and bits of sadness are but a drop in the ocean of suffering and pain. There were others who were overcome by waves of sadness far greater than mine this week. A friend is grieving her empty arms as she waits for a baby, four young children and a father watched their newest arrival slip noisily into the world as their mother slipped quietly out, and a dear old woman lost her home and her family to the stark walls of a nursing home. I watched others try to give answers, reasons, hopeful scenarios... but it all fell listless and weak against the yawning chasm of pain. Sometimes answers just aren't enough. But He is. And so for them, and for myself as we sit in this haze and see through the glass darkly, I ask for Him.