The whole creation groans

The last few weeks have seen such heavy, grievous news at every turn. 

A brave Foreign Service colleague is killed on her way to visit a primary school. I didn't know her, but my supervisor in Shanghai, fresh from a tour in Kabul, did. Someone filled with hate leaves a bomb designed to kill and maim people in their moment of personal victory. And a small town in Texas is consumed in a fiery horror. 

Watching news footage of the explosions at the Boston Marathon finish line sent chills up my spine. I remembered watching my roommate and other Fletcher School classmates run the marathon last year and cheering on Boylston Street as they raced down the final stretch. Other classmates were running this year. It must have been a traumatic end to something that should have been triumphant.

The mayor of Boston is on TV right now speaking at an interfaith service, declaring that in his city, "We take care of each other." You know, it's true. For all the harsh outward manners of local people, I remember a lot of help in the winter time - an elderly neighbor who loaned her ice chopper, employees of the public works department who helped push my car out of a bed of ice.

I've also thought this week about all the other citizens of the world for whom bombs in their public squares have become a common experience - Iraqis, Syrians, Pakistanis, and the list goes on. Not so long ago, the West had its own share of leftist, rightist, and nationalist homegrown terror. And as China and the US are increasingly interconnected, now we share in grief - there's been a lot of shock over here about Lu Lingzi, a graduate student from Shenyang attending Boston University who was one of the three spectators killed.

"For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in the hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time."

And yet life goes on. After months of dreary, damp chill, spring has arrived in Shanghai. Tiny lime green leaves are sprouting on every tree branch. Peach blossoms and warm breezes. That same warm wind even managed to clear out the air for two days and remind us that the sky is, in fact, blue. I strolled through a park Sunday afternoon and was happy to see old people singing in a chorus and kids on the playground. A friend gets engaged, and a coworker prepares to welcome her child into the world. By the Lord's great love, and often incomprehensibly, there are still new mercies each morning.