If you listen to a news broadcast or have a good long read through the news-paper, the road to peace, hope and possibility on this planet appears to be a vertical climb. The terrain is daunting and overwhelming.

It's much easier to ignore the hurt and the hunger, the pain and the fear, the hatred and the horrors, than to deal with them.

Or is it?

It's easy if you stick your head in a hole in the ground and refuse to look at what's happening around you. Easy, that is, if you're happy eating topsoil every day of your life.

Simply acknowledging the injustices against humanity that occur every second of every day is tough. If you own up to that knowledge, you take on the responsibility of finding a way to stop it. If you do nothing, if you look away, if you allow it to continue, you own part of the reason for its existence. That's heavy duty stuff!

But how do you, or I, or any one person take on such a Herculean task and expect to make a real difference?

You can't change the world without first changing yourself. You can open your heart and let it ache for something that has nothing to do with your life, or for a person who doesn't even know you exist. You can round up your own fears and biases and banish them from your soul.

Let the Holy Spirit guide your internal peace and give you the strength to bring it out in to the light of day through the words you speak. My next conversation about why I don't laugh at racial jokes and how I explain why I'm not laughing when I hear one, and your next conversation about how you buy an extra tin of vegetables ever time you go to the grocery store, then drop them off at the Downtown Mission when you have a full box, are two conversations that will make a difference.

The courage of your convictions will empower others to put away their fears and move past their bias and prejudice.

Change yourself and you change the world.

Find your peace and pass it on.

©2000 Terri McPherson
Used with permission

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Then the King will say, "I'm telling the solemn truth:
Whenever you did one of these things to someone
overlooked or ignored, that was me--you did it to me."
Matthew 25:40