Things I know now that I wish I didn't

I spent the morning editing an article on the sexual abuse of girls during warfare in africa. Since I work in the human rights field I often encounter reports and documentaries about the worst evils human beings can inflict on one another. Having to read and re-read (why I hate editing) the graphic details of the physical implications for girls who survive rape and subsequent child birth at a young age make me want to drive an ice pick through my skull. If I never have to read another word about vaginal fistula, it will be eeons too soon.

Unfortunately, these are the things, together with genocide, dire poverty, HIV/AIDS and racism, that once you know about them you either have to spend your whole life working to eradicate them or your whole life finding ways to numb the pain of knowing. This is why I hate when people tease me for being a goody-two-shoes and working in peace and social justice. They act like I'm working in this field to earn bonus points on some great scorecard in the sky. If anything, it's just the opposite. They don't understand that knowing what I know, seeing the people I've seen, reading the reports I've read, I can't do anything else. The very existence of these things breaks me to the core. I could no more refrain from working to bring peace and and end to poverty and injustice in the world than I could keep from breathing. It's not great pleasure that keeps me in the work, but great pain. I know people who have been tortured, people who have heard their name and location read on a radio station calling for their slaughter, people who have been raped, people who have been imprisoned for their beliefs, people who have starved, people who have been deported and exiled from their home country, people who have awoken to the sounds of nearby shelling in their hometown, people who have gone insane in the aftermath of war, and many, many people who have received the grace to be able to overcome and to tell their truths and to truly live a life after such wanton destruction.

So, even if it is the pain that keeps me in this work, it is the hope which keeps me doing the work. Because I believe there can be hope after sheer terror, I believe there can be love in the midst of chaos, and I believe that we can have faith, even when the darkness presses up against us. As the bible says, there is a light in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. In each ghastly darkness there is a ray of light. If in my short time here on earth, I can increase the light, then my time here will have been well spent. May good prevail.