Black Friday (Thursday and Wednesday)

It's been a rough couple of days around here. While we are so close to getting our kids, the reality is we still have steps to take and we don't have any control over those steps. So we are just waiting...waiting...waiting. And it sucks. That being said, there is a new reality to consider, which I have allowed to all but consume me in the last few days.

Have you heard about this:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/11/20/that_other_war?page=0,0

If not, I'll make a long story short, in Goma, Congo a rebel group known as M23 has literally taken over the city.  They are supposedly backed by the Rwandan government and their stated goal is to take over city by city eventually marching the 1000 miles to Kinshasa (where our children are). There have been rebel groups in Congo for forever and they surface, make a bunch of trouble and disappear for a while. Generally the fighting is over resources since Congo is rich in mineral resources. Here is a timeline of the Congo's cycle of rebellion sent to me by my informant on all things world news (Betsy Baldwin). http://graphics.thomsonreuters.com/RNGS/2012/NOV/DRCREBELS_CI.jpg





I will be very honest with you, I saw this news blow up on my Facebook feed and I ignored it for three days because I really didn't want to know. Sometimes I do that because I can't handle all the bad news around the world. It makes me uneducated at times, but I feel so helpless and so small in the face of such huge and sad news it makes me feel better to just not know. I realize this is a poor coping mechanism but it's what I do.

However, it's different this time because the bad news impacts me. It impacts us. It impacts my children. My family. And honestly, it has devastated me. There is for sure a measure of worldly sorrow here. I'm plain old feeling bad for myself and believing the lies that we will never get these kids home. But there is another sorrow. The sorrow that some 16,000 women have been raped in the last few days in Goma and the surrounding area and I cannot do one single thing about it. I have wept over these women. These people who are being killed, pillaged, raped, and run out of town. For what? Greed.

So here I am in the act of balancing my worldly sorrow (which produces death) with my Godly sorrow (which produces life) (2 Corinthians 7:10). Feeling bad for myself and my (would be) children and weeping over people who have lived in poverty their whole lives only to have what little they have taken from them. Their dignity, their meager homes, their family members....the list goes on.

So what can I do? I can pray. I can repent of my worldly sorrow and I can beg God to move on our behalf and on behalf of the children who have families here in the US and on behalf of those who don't have that kind of hope waiting in the wings. Those whose homes are gone, whose wives have been raped, whose children have been lost in this conflict. I can pray, I can ask you to pray and I can weep and cry out in an act of intersession for those who need it more than ever right now.