Response

First hand knowledge changes one understanding.  No long is the scene a simple litany of facts.  You know the details in your heart.  Cold words strung together change into something living and breathing.  The inanimate has become people, relationships, and something particular about the community.  Simply reading and ignoring is no longer an option; one feels, senses, and as a matter of course reacts.  At some point things move from the mind engaging to the participation of our souls.
 
It is easy to predict what normally occurs.  Objective distance becomes an emotional driven reaction.  But what if the first hand knowledge brought something more?  What if we engaged with ever part of our souls?  How would things change? 
 
I find myself first responding in two very different ways.  The natural reaction is almost clinical.  Do what needs to be done.  Take care of the immediate.  Engage but remain appropriately distant.  The person and community is hurting, deal with it!  I’m not sure this is enough.  I do know my actions fulfill the requirements of the law.  I have technically helped those hurt, fed the sick, and responded to the poor.  Yet nothing has changed.
 
In one conflict from yesterday the plea was simple and direct; “‘Give the refugees from Moab sanctuary with you.  Be a safe place for those on the run from the killing fields.’
 
[The response was candid]; ‘When this is all over,’ Judah answers, ‘the tyrant toppled, the killing at an end, all signs of these cruelties long gone, a new government of love will be established in the venerable David tradition.  A Ruler you can depend upon will head this government, a Ruler passionate for justice, a Ruler quick to set things right.’”  (Isaiah 16.4, 5)
 
Yet the response is lacking.  It is as if one has walked the path halfway.  Everything seems fine but everyone senses there’s more.  There’s more.  There is more than the individual, it’s called community; respond to both.  There is more than the immediate, it’s called holistic; respond to both.  There is the now; live in it.