Weep for the world today. Weep for the Gaza strip, its people caught in a maelstrom of jingoism, authoritarianism, and revolt; weep for the Ukraine, its people unintentional witness to the Malaysian airline tragedy that has unfolded before their eyes.  Reading various newspaper accounts about these events, I cringe at the now far too banal detritus they left behind.  Scattered plaster and rubble, blood stains on a door, bullets lodged in a concrete wall, a child's notebook, a tour guide to Indonesia, a pair of pants, a container of hand cream, an I-phone, sundry and assorted evidences of lives now forever gone.  Some reflected persons who had lived long, others persons whose lives had barely begun.  No matter:  each is a tragedy, an immensely moving tragedy, a tragedy that unfortunately is now spawning others, creating gaps and crevasses in other lives, the lives of those now left to continue without the person who is gone.  It's a picture of a creation fractured beyond belief.
     God is weeping, too.  He is weeping for the deaths of people he made, weeping for the end of lives before their time.  He weeps for the tragedies that afflict human beings.  While in the wake of these tragedies--and countless others--we can argue for days about the precise exchange between divine sovereignty and human will, we can certainly agree that death is not what God wants.  Above all, God wants us to live.  He wants us to live and trust, to trust and see that he is there, always and forevermore.