Just recently, the hope that things can change has become very important to me. For better or for worse, sometimes it’s just nice when things are different.
Some other things have been suggested to me lately in my talks with others.
God is much bigger and much better than anything we can conceive of. One of my friends really likes telling me that ‘God is bigger than any box we can put him in.’ I think that is really important.
Sometimes, maybe even most of the time, the things we think, however logical, however scientific, are deeply affected by our point of view. Things may look completely different from the other side; things may really be completely different.
I have really been struggling with the idea of suffering. I wonder why people suffer, I wonder why some people suffer more than others but most of all, I wonder how there can be any meaning in all of the suffering. I really doubt that there is any satisfactory answer to that. There are many trite answers, many answers that don’t really mean anything, many ways to blame the victims but very few answers that have any hope for this world (in this world) attached to them. Looking at history, things seem like they have been bad for a very long time, and they don’t really show any signs of getting better.
Someone told me today; very wisely, that we can’t know how someone else feels or see the hope or the hurt that they have – we can only know how we would feel looking at things from our own point of view. It’s easy to say other people’s lives are great or terrible and take some meaning from that … but really, we have no idea of their view of their own life and it’s really not our place to make that call. (I guess in some ways that is dismissing the real issue, but there is some definite truth there.)
So to go back to where I started – for me right now, some things in my life seem very unfair, but I see now that there is hope. That there is always hope: when you feel like you are at the bottom then I suppose there is no where to look except for up. For me, I think a lot of the issue is that I need to stop moping around, stop feeling hurt and get up and change the things that I can.
Finally, a couple extremely pressing questions: Why are the past and present tense forms of ‘read’ spelled the same? But, more importantly, why do we pronounce them differently?


