It's late again.

And I can't sleep again.

Aaaand I have a meeting at 7:30 in Minneapolis tomorrow morning. Yay!

There's a lot of hard things in the world.  I've been so thankful for... everything lately that I think it can both blind you to the hard things and also make you extra-aware of them.

For instance, the doggie Arisa put on facebook that is in the Pointe Coupee pound. His owners brought him there and he escaped and beat his owners home, but they just took him right back. They didn't want him. I'm not sure why. That's sad. Rejection like that just strikes a chord in me somehow. Maybe it's because I have such a pull toward Fostering. Or maybe that's WHY I have such a desire to do that? I'm not sure.

And I was thinking about it tonight in my Environmental class. Instead of a final (it's just a half-semester class), we presented group projects on nano-particles.  They're these tiny-tiny chemicals that industries use... and we actually kind of have no idea what they're doing to us. (They're in your M&Ms and sunscreen and yogurt and toothpaste, etc). It IS scary. And I DO think it's important. But then I think about the girl in the class from India. Or the guy from Uganda. And I think, "Oh, God. What do they think of this project?" Do nano-particles really mean anything when you have orphan crises' from HIV? Do nano-particles have any significance in the world when we're talking about child soldiers and child prostitutes and the cast system in India or gangs or... any of the other terrible, horrible things there are out there.

A friend from college just posted an article on facebook about how Mother Teresa wasn't quite the saint she's portrayed as. How she actually celebrated suffering instead of lessening it. The article said her homes for the dying were unsanitary and in-humane. They didn't give pain medication or do everything they could for their patients. But the article said SHE received first-class treatment when SHE needed it.

I don't know HOW I feel about this article. I've also heard stories of her getting in shipments of shoes for her homes and how she would wait until everyone else picked out their shoes... and she'd take the last pair that was probably the ugliest, the dirtiest, the oldest. Is that true? I'm not sure. Maybe we shouldn't glorify people or consider TRUE PEOPLE to be SAINTS of any sort at all. I don't know.

I'm not even quite sure what my point is.  I guess these are random thoughts I have.

God is so good. Even in all of this. Even in our hard times. Equally good in our good times. He never changes. He's always the same. Do I do enough? Do I love enough? Do I help the least of these? Do I help bring His Kingdom to earth in the midst of all these things?

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.