Dr. Mary Nelson
Executive Director
In Ramah, a voice is heard, crying and weeping loudly.
Rachel mourns for her children, and refuses to be comforted, because they are no more.
But I, the Lord, say to dry your tears.
Someday your children will come home from the enemy’s land.
Then all you had done for them will be greatly rewarded.
So don’t lose hope.
- Jeremiah 31: 14-17
There have been a lot of tears in these last months—school girls stolen and missing in Nigeria, young men abducted and killed in Mexico, youth leaving their homes and joining ISIS, young men killed on the streets, and the mass murder of students in a school in Peshawar, Pakistan.
Rachel mourns for her children, and refuses to be comforted, because they are no more.
But I, the Lord, say to dry your tears.
Someday your children will come home from the enemy’s land.
Then all you had done for them will be greatly rewarded.
So don’t lose hope.
- Jeremiah 31: 14-17
There have been a lot of tears in these last months—school girls stolen and missing in Nigeria, young men abducted and killed in Mexico, youth leaving their homes and joining ISIS, young men killed on the streets, and the mass murder of students in a school in Peshawar, Pakistan.
Too easily some of us succumb to despair and hopelessness. Others of us are not involved, don’t feel the pain. It seems distant to us. But on the streets in my Chicago community, it is not distant. The violence is here and now. The killings happen. Young lives snuffed out. There are a lot of tears.
So what do we do? Wring our hands and give up? Try and ignore the violence?
We will be facing this issue at the upcoming 2015 Parliament in Salt Lake City, October 15-19th, and looking for people to identify what can and is being done, and to make our personal commitments to take positive action.
We will be facing this issue at the upcoming 2015 Parliament in Salt Lake City, October 15-19th, and looking for people to identify what can and is being done, and to make our personal commitments to take positive action.
In the meantime, it would be a good resolution for 2015 for each of us to commit to do something with and for young people—providing alternatives to violence, showing there is another way, joining others to open up doors of opportunity for better education, ensuring that each child has possibilities for a future with hope.
Jim Wallis often says, “Hope is believing in spite of the evidence, and then watching the evidence change.”
So I, like the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah, will not lose hope for 2015.
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