Exploring Facebook I noticed several of my friends status' were things like "We are fine", or "Safe in Jerusalem." These were friends still living in Jerusalem. So I immediately went to the BBC website to discover what I'm sure most of you heard on the news yesterday; A bomb went of in Jerusalem at the central bus station. It wasn't necessarily a shock, I didn't really feel surprised. Things are tense over there. Everyone I know there is safe and life was continuing as normal. And that's when it started to bother me. Life there is still normal. Bombs are not normal, but people continue about daily life. It's not like it doesn't affect them. But they don't respond like we would in America - freaking out, pulling kids out of school, shutting everything down, stocking up on groceries for the end of the world. Certainly Israel has had more experience with bombs going off, but it hasn't been a common thing for years.
One of the first things people would ask me when I got home was "Did any bombs go off?" N0. Life was very normal. In fact, I felt safer in Jerusalem than I feel in many American cities. And this is what makes me sad, and a little angry (although I try to remind myself that two years ago I probably would have been one of these people). Israel is not a dangerous place. Kids go to school, parents to work, tourists wander the streets. Jerusalem was a place I called home for 3 1/2 months. And I would go back in an instant. But on the news the only time you ever hear of Jerusalem is when some kind of traumatic event occurs. That is not common! The tensions that they amp up are there certainly. But I walked through Muslim, Christian, and Jewish quarters of Jerusalem and everybody lives, works, and gets along fine together in normal everyday life.
Not only that, but I was then processing why anybody would think that setting off a bomb is going to do any good. It does nothing but make a mess and hurt people. It doesn't prove a point or make a statement. Except that you are angry or stupid enough to think your bomb will do anything except make people more inclined to stand against you. It doesn't make people listen. I just don't understand how our world works. It makes no logical sense to me. Maybe that's just it. The world is not logical, and it makes it very hard for logical people to live in it.
In my theology class this week we talked about Wisdom. What wisdom is, does, how it is/was viewed in the Old Testament. We had read the first nine chapters of Proverbs and were discussing prophets, priests, and wise-men. The world then was not wise. The world now isn't any wiser. We just have bigger and better ways to show our foolishness.
Well that's my babble for today. Like throwing up words onto a page-a mess. Maybe next time the processing will be a bit neater, something I prefer but rarely happens when your mind is full.
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