And how does that make you feel?
My heart is hurting… and yet not as much as it should be, did you know I constantly have to pray to have empathy toward people? To me this just seems sad in and of itself, we are all human, shouldn’t we be able to have compassion for those who are hurting? More than just a fleeting thought as we go about our day?
what comes next is heartbreaking… read at your own risk.
Every other week I try to do a “Today in history” blog post, as I thought it was interesting and would give me a break from the crafting side of my blog (yet I haven’t done a craft type blog in awhile)… anyway, I was looking up historic events that have happened on today, July 17, and was met with some horrible information. It started off all well and good with normal things and then this past decade things shifted. Every event had to do with death and killings. Now, doing research for this post late at night, and seeing these results left me going to sleep with my heart hurting. These are those stories:
2007-TAM Airlines (TAM Linhas Aéreas) Flight 3054 crashes upon landing during rain in São Paulo. This is Brazil's deadliest aviation accident to date with an estimated 199 deaths.
-An Airbus 320 with at least 176 people on board skidded off a runway while landing Tuesday night at the main airport in São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, and crashed into an office building and a gas station across a highway, setting off a conflagration that took firefighters more than six hours to bring under control.
2009-Jakarta double bombings at the JW Marriott and Ritz-Carlton Hotels killed 9 people including 4 foreigners.
-Large hotels overseas – especially Western-owned hotels or those popular with foreigners -- have become prime targets for terrorists in recent years, with nearly a dozen major blasts at hotels since the Marriott was attacked here in 2003. The intelligence group Stratfor has called these high-profile hotels “the quintessential soft target.”
2012-17 people are wounded in a bar shooting in Tuscaloosa, Alabama
-Tuscaloosa Police Chief Steve Anderson tells the Associated Press that the gunman fired first through a window of the Copper Top bar, then shot at people outside as they fled. He says the gunman never went inside during the assault.
2013-7 people are killed by a car bomb in Damascus, Syria
-At least 70,000 people have died since the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad began just over two years ago.
2013-58 people are killed in floods in Sichuan Province, China
-The worst damage appeared to be in the city of Dujiangyan, where a rain-soaked mountainside gave way on Wednesday, burying 11 homes and as many as 40 people. Xinhua, the state news agency, said rescue workers and sniffer dogs from Chengdu, the provincial capital, were rushing to the area, which only recently recovered from the 2008 earthquake. The earthquake left 87,000 dead or missing.
2014-Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 is shot down over Eastern Ukraine by a Buk surface-to-air missile launched from pro-Russian separatist-controlled territory, killing all 283 passengers and 15 crew on board
-The board was sharply critical of the Ukrainian authorities for failing to close the airspace above the conflict zone. It found that 160 civil aviation flights went through on the day of the crash before the airspace was closed.
2015-Suicide bomber in Khan Bani Saad, Iraq, kills 120, ISIS claims responsibility
-The mostly-Shiite victims were gathered to mark the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, which ended Friday for Iraqi Shiites and a day earlier for Iraqi Sunni Muslims.
Police said a small truck detonated in a crowded marketplace in the town of Khan Beni Saad Friday night in what quickly turned celebrations into a scene of horror
How have we gotten so desensitized to these horrible events? How has human life become something people can do away with so easily. Where has empathy and compassion gone in this world?
In the Bible the word compassion is used upwards of 40 times… you think God was trying to tell us something? He reminds us over and over of his own toward us and for us to show compassion in our own lives.
2 Corinthians 1:3-4
Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.
Sadly, we need this reminder over, and over and over again. Just look at social media, one post can incite so much rage in others that they feel they must put their opinion and tear you down for yours. No, I am not saying, “accept everyone for who they are” because who we are, well we are sinful individuals. We do need to be challenged and challenge others to become better but without compassion we will just be battling each other, which will just make us dig our heals in on our own opinions. Compassion goes out the window yet again, and then some of the tragedies mentioned above come out because we see people as just differing thoughts and it is easier to put human life into categories… and we all lose.
