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Dear Friends,
It has been a very difficult week. Horrors unleashed in Israel, the inevitable retaliatory bloodshed as terrorists now hide and shield themselves with innocents in hospitals and apartment buildings, gullibility and moral obtuseness and moral equivalency as far as the eye can see in modern journalism, academia, and the civic realm. The spirit of the ancient Amalekites revived. Antisemitism so brazenly embraced and celebrated in our streets and on the campus commons and in the halls of Congress. The leader of Hamas, Khaled Mashaal, right in the thick of the battle from his luxury apartment in Doha, Qatar, called for a worldwide “day of rage” today, Friday the 13th. That’s an uncanny date for the unleashing of horrors. The world seems a tinderbox primed to explode.
These are weighty times, and the gloom of our weather isn’t helping my mood. It is ridiculous for me to talk about my mood. As if anything is about me. But I am reminded that the world can be a weary and dreary place. It lies under the weight of sin and suffering and thorns and thistles. And I just don’t have the heart right now to write more about Hamas and their barbarism.
It seems obtuse to write about ordinary or lesser things when others are experiencing such suffering and torment. But I must remind myself that God cares about everything. He cares about food and clothes and sparrows and the lilies of the field and the number of hairs on the head. We ought not let weightier matters paralyze us from engaging in our own lives. The fallen world shows up everywhere, not just in the places that garner the headlines.
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