After the Indonesian tsunami I remember my brother just sitting sort of shell-shocked in his room. “All those people, just gone. Can’t listen to music. Can’t hang out. Just...gone.” 1/ https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1250159339781922816

He was very young; I guess I was too. One of those pinpricks of grief that the whole rest of the world floods in through; imaginable only in the simplest distilling of the depravations it entails. 2/

After Kent Brantly survived Ebola he talked in interviews about what a lonely and humiliating disease it can be, how it puts people out of reach of their loved ones, or kills their loved ones in exchange for their tenderness. 3/

They tried to mitigate that, where he served. He tried to help people feel less alone.

I think of both Kent and my brother, seeing the charts, hearing the numbers. A straightforward moral realization right in front of us, inescapable: all those people, they died alone. 4/

Ten thousand in NY alone. It’s staggering. I just want to say out loud that it’s staggering.

The Gospels put exquisite language to God’s anguish over our suffering: God flinches when a sparrow falls; numbers the hairs on our heads. 5/

And we know that the vulnerable are like kindling in any crisis: in a disease, in great heat, in floods, in a war, an actual fire, they burn.

From several corners of the Christian tradition, then, this moment is thus pregnant with meaning, and with duty. 6/

Care for God’s estimate of my actions, because of God’s love for me and the world God created out of love, was made molecular, basic for me, in the way I was raised. 7/

I am Very Sophisticated now and have an actual Degree in Ethics. But it still comes down to my parents praying every night at my bedside. Thanking God for each other, for grace, for us. Asking for us to have big hearts when we grew up. 8/

A God who wants to hear from you, who you can speak freely to. This was their God; this is mine, best I know how to believe it. But because this God loves us, an accounting must be made. In the dark. No stages, no retweets, no performance. 9/

In that context it matters whether we can account for our feelings about the world and its pain. Whether we suffer with those who suffer. It matters because it matters to a God who remembers the names even of birds. 10/

It matters because each irreplaceable life matters as much as yours. They listen to music and hang out and then they do not, ever again. 11/

They were just as real and full of delight, and fear, and need, and a world is emptied when they die, even though they are disproportionately not mighty, or wealthy, or even young. 12/

So this pain, is ours to share inasmuch as it is God’s to feel. But because it is lighting the disempowered in fire, it is not just sentiment. It is also an indictment, a question. How much better a world can we build? And when? 13/13