Friday afternoon thoughts...

It's hard to believe that the weekend is here already.  It's been one of those weeks that flies by but hasn't left much of a lasting impression.  I'm in a blah mood and don't really know why.
 
Maybe because I had a super scary dream last night that I was taken as a prison of war in Iraq.  I don't know why I was over there in the first place because I wasn't a soldier or anything, but I remember thinking I'm so mad at President Bush for making us be here!  I think Fahrenheit 9/11 had something to do with my dream, even though I saw it a few weeks ago.  I highly recommend it if you haven't seen it yet.  A powerful movie, no matter how over the top people say it is.  Hopefully people who aren't so sure who they are going to vote for will go see it.
 
Amy told me about her activist friend who got arrested by passing out voting registration forms to people in the theater after Fahrenheit 9/11.  Crazy.
 
Anyway, the war has definitely been on my mind at lot lately.  I keep thinking back to the woman in the film who was screaming and crying outside of her uncle's house about how many funerals they had been to in the past weeks.  She said something about god bringing justice to those who did this.  I can't remember the exact words, but she was just so overwhelmed with disbelief and emotion and the injustice of it all that the only thing she could hope for is that god would punish those responsible.  Or irresponsible depending on how you look at it.
 
I just can't imagine what that pain is like.  To see your entire network of people, friends and family, splintered between the dead and the living, scattered across the world.  You feel homesick, but everything that feels like home is gone.  How can you live through something like that and go on?  How can you survive lifetimes of this suffering?  It just seems so unfair. 
 
Then I think, I can't possibly be this lucky forever.  I think, something like this is going to happen to me, to us - it's inevitable.  My mind goes wild imagining scenarios like the ones that happen in Iraq all the time.  Scenes that happened during the Holocaust.  Someone barging into a peaceful house in the middle of the night, hauling off family members with no explanation.  It amazes me what the human spirit can endure. 
 
I had another scary dream sometime after 9/11.  There was some sort of terrorist attack going on, and I was so scared.  I frantically picked up my cell phone and started trying to call everyone I knew to see if they were okay.  First, my family, then friends and so on.  Except for when I scrolled down through my phone book, everytime I tried to select a name to call, it disappeared.  Before my eyes, all the names in my cell phone just vanished.  I was left, holding this phone, with no one to call, knowing that they were all gone. 
 
But that whole idea of god bringing justice to a situation seems so complex.  Who should be blamed for all the innocent killed?  For the innocence lost?  I know that if I were going through anything that painful, I would want an explanation.  How, god, how, how, how could you let this happen?  Why, WHY, is this happening?  I would want god to assure me that the situation was being handled.  That somehow this would all be worked out in the end.
 
I surely don't have any answers about this figured out.  I can just feel that deep calling of that woman, crying out to god in such a deep way, asking for something to be done about all this suffering, asking for peace, for justice, for her family's lives not to be in vain. 
 
Even if she is calling out to a different god in name, I truly believe that god hears her.  That somehow god will do something.  And I want god to do something, even if that means that my life is going to be changed.  That's the hardest part: admitting that for someone else's situation to get better, you might have to sacrifice some things.  
 
But if you really have a big picture view of the kingdom, we're all in this together.  It's everyone's suffering and it's everyone gain in the end.
 
Definitely some random thoughts for a Friday afternoon and I'm not sure how they all fit together, but hopefully I'll gain some clarity soon.  Either way, my "blah" mood had been put into perspective and I feel a whole lot more thankful.