It is a balmy, beautiful August morning. I sit drinking coffee by the lake, the dogs around me. Elderly Pete basks peacefully in the sun. Auggie snorts impatiently, waiting for me to engage with his ball-playing, and young Eli has left his watch post at the end of the dock to lie next to my chair. A lawn mower purrs in the distance. A door slams. Fish jump. Ducks quack and splash. Squirrels chatter. Birds call. A bull frog grumps.

All should be well.

But across the world chaos reigns. Death, destruction, fear, murder, torture, rape, and slavery threaten. People climb onto departing airplanes, clinging to the wings, in desperate fear of what is to come. The planes depart, and the bodies can be seen hurtling to earth, prey to the most horrific final fears as they fall. 

An American flag flutters in the breeze across the lake. 

Here, there is comfort in powerlessness. With no recourse but to drink my coffee, I can stay comfortable. I can’t fix Afghanistan. I can’t save a single person. Lucky me.

I am ashamed.

And yet…and yet…this day, this calm, this comfort, this stroke of fate that brought me here, to have been born in a free state, in a liberal democracy…this is fortune. And to leave it unnoticed, to ignore it, not to savor it, is the very definition of sin. 

I envy my dogs in their innocence.

There are no clouds in the sky, but there is a cloud over this day.

May God forgive us.