Most of us have heard about the awful inroads that the Ebola virus is making in the people groups of western Africa.  It seems unstoppable.  The latest estimates are that it will kill over a million people by the end of the year.  We have all seen photographs of dead bodies being carried out of homes by workers, and we have probably all heard about the many health care workers who have succumbed to the disease while treating others for it.  And this, most people fear, are only the beginning.

     How do we deal with such horror?  How do we deal with the sight of a father thrashing and coughing up blood as his family watches him die?  How do we deal with the sight of a young man weeping as workers take away the body of his mother?  How do we deal with the dread, the raw, unvarnished dread that is sweeping through village after village?
     (And now, it seems, even in the affluent West.)
     We send money, we support the workers, we pray.  Yet as in the case of the father who, I mentioned last week, in a fit of rage, killed his six grandchildren, his daughter, and himself, we often feel helpless, utterly hopeless, in the face of such unspeakable horror. I'm reminded of the recollections of an Iraqi who was tortured by former leader Saddam Hussein's secret police, strapped to a table deep underground, screaming and screaming and, he said, "No one could hear me."
     Is anyone listening?  Is anyone hearing the cries of the oppressed, the wails of despair that ravage the world?  Such thoughts make positing intimations of God exceedingly difficult.  Is he really out there?
     He is.  But we won't know it until we ask.  And we won't ask until we realize and decide that we can.  And we indeed can.  Jesus didn't die and rise for naught:  in his life, and death, God felt--and feels--our pain.