The war between Russia and Ukraine is still going on, with no end in sight.
Suddenly, the conflict between Israel and Palestine flares up. Not only does it take the attention away from the suffering in Ukraine, the war is threatening to scale up the suffering in Gaza into a gigantic scale.
In the mean time, the civil war in Sudan is getting less attention. But that does not mean it has stopped. Likewise the civil wars in Mali, Ethiopia and Somalia.
There is also Yemen, Syria, Nagorno-Karabakh (between Azerbaijan and Armenia), and the western part of Pakistan.
Even in Europe, there is still the conflict between Kosovo and Serbia.
Closer to home, there is Myanmar. For a period of time, it has been opening up and hope were high. Our teams had actually served there for several years. Then the oppression and conflicts returned.
In North Korea, there is, presumably no fighting. But it remains a big prison for most people.
In many many other parts of the world, people are fleeing their own countries (or regions) because of poverty, oppression (political, gender, ethnic, religious and otherwise), threats of war, and other reasons.
The world is certainly not at peace, for many many people.
In the face of all these, it is not easy to keep believing in an all-powerful, loving God. Of course, plenty of reasons have been given to explain why God is allowing these sufferings to keep happening. Many reasons have also been given to explain why we shouldn’t even try to rectify the situation, or at least not to make it a priority. One of the primary reasons given being that without faith in God, there is no effective solution. That may well be true. But doing nothing in the face of such tremendous depths of suffering and evil makes it very hard for many to believe that there is really an all-powerful, just, loving God.
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