And who is my sister? God, who is my sister?    

They are all your sisters.  Croatian Catholics.  Bosnian Muslims.  Serbian Orthodox.  They—and every other woman you will ever meet—are all your sisters.  They are all part of the human family I have created.

That’s what happens when you open your mind and your heart to God and to the world.  You end up with a huge family.  You can’t possibly meet the need of every family member, but you can never again dismiss their needs thoughtlessly.  They’re family.  And they haunt you.  An unexpected image dances across your vision at an inopportune time.  A light-hearted moment is darkened by a disturbing subtext.  A chill pierces your heart on a sunny day.

Yes, you’ll end up haunted.  Even more, you’ll end up in despair.  There’s no way around it.  I can’t remember who wrote that “God’s heart is an open wound of love,” but I believe it.  And I believe our hearts become open wounds, too, when we dare to love this damaged world God loves. 

There are two antidotes to despair.  One is denial.  Pretending you didn’t see that picture.  Didn’t hear those screams.  Didn’t read that story.  Or maybe you acknowledge the horror of what you saw or heard or read, but you pretend it’s not your responsibility.  There’s nothing you can do.  What difference can one person make?  And where would you start anyway?

Denial works.  But it shrinks your heart.  It makes you a little less human.  It puts distance between you and God.  

The other antidote to despair is action—doing something, anything, to address the need.  Seems like every few years I have an experience that pushes me so far into despair that I toy with denial.  I start listening to the cynic inside me who asks why I even bother to hope in the face of such a broken world.  But I have learned that if I consciously choose action I will find hope.

For years I had been involved in my church’s ministry partnerships in the inner city of Chicago and in under-resourced communities in Latin America.  But through television specials, news articles, and seemingly random conversations, my mind and heart were gripped by the tragic stories coming from sub-Saharan Africa.  I heard the staggering statistics related to AIDS and global poverty, but since I’m not a numbers person I knew I would have to put flesh and bone on the statistics in order to understand. My kids were in their mid-twenties and both were in-between jobs.  So the three of us traveled with a humanitarian organization to Kenya, Uganda and Zambia.

We walked through filthy hospitals jammed with men and women on torn, stinking mattresses dying alone of AIDS.

We met pastors who bury AIDS victims three at a time; if they did individual funerals they would spend every day with the dead and be unable to minister to the living.

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