We are hearing so many stories of tragedy and trauma, of danger and despair. Some of the horror is magnified by the immediacy with which we now receive the news. Social media and news reporting brings word and image straight into our homes and hearts from the real-time scene. “Breaking news” threatens to break us. For some of us, the pain is present in our immediate and extended families Is there anything we can reply to disillusionment and despair? To the erosion of hope? To fear? What does the intersection of faith and art (which this blog addresses) offer in response to this reality? How is our energy best spent in helping each other?
Howard Thurman offers this: “The mass attack of disillusionment and despair, distilled out of the collapse of hope, has so invaded our thoughts that what we know to be true and valid seems unreal and ephemeral. There seems to be little energy left for aught but futility. This is the great deception…To drink in the beauty that is within reach, to clothe one’s life with simple deeds of kindness, to keep alive a sensitiveness to the movement of the spirit of God in the quietness of the human heart and in the workings of the human mind – this is as always the ultimate answer to the great deception.”
roots reaching past drought
pushing up through rocky path
surviving In sun or shadow,
blooming with perennial grace
alive
map 6-14-2013
Stones and Feathers 
Wow, this is wonderfully written, and so timely–as I’ve been dealing with another relapse into depression. God’s grace is so good, so present–and I’m so grateful that He visits blogs like yours. May He bless you abundantly–much love, Caddo
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Amazing. Grace. Thank you for commenting Caddo.
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Thanks for this reminder, Mary Ann. It’s so easy to feel overcome and we, or at least I, need to be reminded that it’s in me to overcome the perceived dysfunction of the world.
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I think we all need the reminders, Sam. We can be salt and light to each other.
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