Practicing Peace in Troubled Times

We certainly are living in troubled times.   As the song says sometimes windows of the world seems to be covered with rain - pain. We just turn on the TV or look at the newspaper and we see or read about all the pain and violence of our times.

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I had a really peaceful childhood. There was no violence in our little mid-western town. Then when I was 11 I sat by an upright radio console and listened to America being told that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, I planted a Victory Garden when my uncles fought in the Second World War. The war did not touch me very much. I remember not being able to make fudge which I loved because our sugar was rationed. (Small sacrifice) I only saw a little about the war on the black and white newsreels at the local theater when I went each Saturday morning to to watch the cowboy movies. I lived through the Korean War, the advent of the atomic bomb and the violence it created, I was scared when Kennedy announced the Missile crisis, cried for 3 days in front of the TV when Kennedy was shot. It was then that my worldview was shattered. Until then I could not believe that a President in our country could be shot.

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Of course I knew that others had, but it wasn’t in the world I knew at that time. Then Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy. Then the Ohio students being shot, the riots at the Democratic convention, the civil rights demonstrations and the demonstrations against the Vietnam war and we were participating in them. It was a frightening time, and there was so much violence. Life was not peaceful.

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Then came the violence that would change our way of life in the country - probably forever. 9/11. It was shortly after that Journeys held our first service. After 9/11 I think we were all stunned, and we sought one another out to be together to grieve and find a sense security. Many, many changes have followed including the tightening of security at airports and buildings, the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, the many loses of privacy, the color coded heightened security announcements, shootings in schools, abortion clinics, and even churches and in Columbia neighborhoods. Indeed we are living in a very troubled world. And sometimes, I think that times are worse now as we are so connected around the world and there is much global unrest. The history of the world is full of wars and rumors of wars as the Bible says.
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