Not always easy

It's a beautiful morning here -- clear, cold and sunny; the mountains (that's Mount Baker off in the distance) are out from behind their usual cloud cover.  But the wind is fierce and cold, out of the north, and pounding our beach so hard that it's making the light fixture in our bedroom rattle.

Which means sleep has been fitful for all of us this morning; we keep giving up and wandering downstairs to watch the waves and then going back up to bed again, exhausted.  My daughter even went out into the wind at one point to see if she could figure out what was rattling at her end of the house. (Turns out it was something on the roof; nothing she could fix.)

But it is, for now at least, a minor inconvenience; I keep thinking of the people of New Orleans back during Hurricane Katrina, standing on top of their houses waiting for the winds to stop, for the waters to subside; hoping desperately for rescue... And those thoughts carry me to all the other troubled places in the world, places where things seem to have gone hopelessly out of control; where people are just wishing that whatever it is would just stop, that someone could come and make it all better, keep them and their loved ones safe.

It can be difficult, if you take the time to watch or read or listen to the news, to carry the knowledge of all that's wrong in the world without beginning to feel helpless and hopeless.  And I wish I had an easy or reassuring answer for that challenge. 

But we both know there are no easy answers; no simple solutions.  I just have to trust that it's enough to be aware, to pray, and to do the best I can to follow where I'm led and do what I feel called to do. But it's not always easy to listen, or to know, it's not always easy to do, and there are definitely days when it's not easy to accept that that is enough.