Who is my neighbor?

"But wanting to justify himself, [the lawyer] asked Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?"
Luke 10:29

I've been home with a fever-y flu the past two days. And I've been following the Sichuan earthquake news. Over 50,000 dead, the BBC says. Those numbers are just so huge. Sometimes I try to imagine individual people. I have an image of a woman, walking along a road in a grey place, and her child was killed when his school collapsed, and her husband is missing, and she doesn't have anywhere to sleep because her house is a broken heap. Maybe she is walking to the next village, to look for her parents? And then I try to multiply her by a couple million. Whoa.

What is it like to lose so much? It must be lonely -- to be surrounded with so much destruction, and not know what will happen to you next, and yet overwhelming -- because millions of people around you are in the same situation. The cyclone in Myanmar is exactly the same. And disasters like this happen again and again.

The world is so full of so many people in great pain, I really really don't understand. It feels weird, being safe in my apartment -- having the luxury of lying in bed for two days, trying to get better. I don't pretend it's easy to believe in God.

Maybe the world is just too big. If it was smaller, it would be easier to take care of our neighbors -- if they all lived down the street, we could bring them casseroles, hug them, let them sleep over. Ah, the fantasies of a fever. Because if they lived down the street, the disasters would just happen to all of us.

I'm going back to sleep now.