Pray for India.  With one of the world's worse outbreaks of the coronavirus, this nation of 1.4 billion people is struggling greatly.  Cremations are running around the clock, oxygen shortages are frequent, and hospitals have long run out of beds to care for the sick.  There seems to be no end to the country's suffering.  It's unspeakably tragic.

     With their wealth and influence, the nations of the West were first in line for the virus vaccine.  Everybody else had to wait in a long line.  This also applied to medical equipment and assistance.  If a nation didn't have enough of either, it could not count on a wealthier nation to come to its aid: everyone was on her own.

     In his Shantung Compound, theology professor Langdon Gilkey describes his time in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in World War II China.  To Gilkey's embarrassment and chagrin, he observed that it was the most religious and most affluent inmates who proved to be the most selfish.  Few wanted to share.

     Such disconnected behavior makes one wonder:  why believe in God, anyway?  It doesn't seem to change anything.

     To this, I say, gingerly, that we can only believe, with good reason, that God's love is greater than how too many believers interpret it.

     True selflessness can only be infinite.

     (Happily, as I finished this blog, I noticed that the U.S. had offered India some assistance, and even its lifelong enemy Pakistan expressed its solidarity with its neighbor.)