A sparse room decorated with peeling posters of food and celebrities. A green lock on the door the quintessence of flimsy. A half filled thermos of slowly going lukewarm butter tea and a mat covered with a blanket serving as a bed. A story, in broken in English, on the lips spilling from the overflow of a girl's broken heart. “My family is against me... I hid for three months but they found me... they will not let me go to study the book or work at a place with free time on Sundays. They make me go to temples with them. I am the youngest daughter, my family has three monks and my elder brother makes idols for the temples... I am bad... I do not study with other believers...” What would your family do if they found out you were doing that? “They would forget me.”
I have made you and I will carry you; I will bear and save you.
A gray classroom on a gray morning. Thirty-eight distracted students and thirty-eight reasons for distraction. A lesson revealing lack of understanding and changing a weeks worth of lesson plans. A kind, cheerful, hard-working, attentive student in the front row, face buried in arms on the desk and long black ponytail in disarray over her unmoving shoulders. A quiet sob turned to an open mouthed cry. A lesson forfeited, a girl overcome, dragged wailing from the classroom by no less than ten classmates. A teacher helpless, worthless, and chalk covered: holding back her own tears sprung into being from the witness of such seemingly random agony and the total and complete inability to comprehend or heal.
Therefore my people will know my name; therefore they will know on that day that I am He who says: Here I am.
A reality.
A battle rages in the land of the dark. Lifeless creations longing for life fighting alone against that which they have never chosen. Glimpses of truth, bright lights of belief burning as fragile as kites in a hurricane, as candles in a thunderstorm, as a dream in the morning. This is the air breathed, it is the dust covering shoes, it is existence in this horrifying land of shadow.
A reminder.
May I never forget, though the days dark and I woefully inadequate to dispel such gloom, that I serve the one who proclaims in absolute truth:
It was my hand that stretched out the heavens.
And a hand which does that surely is not to short to save.
