GRR, I guess it is just one of those days where you're bound to be in a funk and you just have to be okay with it. Of course, I'm sure I could do something about it if I were, say, on vacation at a luxurious island resort :) But since I'm at the office, I'll have to make do with that.
That didn't make much sense but I don't care too much today!
My brain (or, probably more likely, the human brain) works in such weird ways...last night I finished a book called Marley and Me, a book a journalist published a few years ago about life with his crazy Labrador. I had started the book a few months ago as a lite-lit break from all the heady readings I've been doing lately about social justice and women's issues and such. Anyway, as a fellow dog-lover who has a similarly insane pooch, I unexpectedly ended up loving the book, which is very well written. ANYway, I had been putting off the last chapter for about a month, because I knew what it would contain. And last night I decided that if I couldn't handle it in a book I wouldn't be able to handle it in real life, so I finished it.
And cried my eyes out. Geez. And back to the point about weird-brain-workings, reading about Marley dying (in case you didn't figure that part out) naturally made me think of how much I'll miss my own aging puppy when he leaves us in an inevitably short few years, which made me think and grieve again over my family's loss of my cousin Joanna earlier this year. And continuing into this morning, I'm thinking about the dirty little secrets and disappointing truths about the nonprofit sector that most people outside the NGO world assume don't exist, and about the infuriating (to me) divisiveness that often appears to be the predominant feature of the modern-day Church, and I'm reading about inadequate legislation for labor-and-sex-trafficked victims, and about heartbreaking stories of trafficking, rape and domestic abuse survivors, and non-survivors. And I'm reading the blog update of a little baby girl with frustrating brain tumor treatment, and thinking about the two other women I know fighting the side effects of inoperable brain tumors, and wondering why the husband of one of them--my friend and former pastor--hasn't updated his blog in five days.
Just had to get that out...
The past 12 hours have reminded me of a lesson I learned repeatedly when I worked at the Alliance of AIDS Services - that if you're not careful, you can let yourself get distracted from the good things in life by the seemingly overpowering and overshadowing bad things. It's hard when you're burdened to work for the good, because that often means working in the face of the bad, which can almost seem to sap away your hope sometimes.
But you just can't let that happen; you have to believe with everything you've got that there is always more hope.
(preaching to myself, here.)
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