If this had happened to you …
I’ve been moved and paralyzed since I stumbled upon “Intended Consequences“, a multi-media presentation by Jonathan Torgovnik.
The world has a way of intruding into my writing. I’d planned to write a sequel to my novel As the Heart Bones Break. I’d intended to focus on a female character in the first novel and set the story in the refugee camps on the Thai-Burmese border. But, a young pregnant refugee woman walked into the plot and demanded that her story be told.
I had to do research.
I googled ‘rape and forced pregnancies’. What I got was Jonathan Torgovnik and his retrospective on the babies born of the Rwandan genocide.
Click to watch it here – INTENDED CONSEQUENCES
And here is the meditation I wrote about keeping faith even in the face of this tragedy and all other tragedies like this.
Meditation on Psalm 23
You have done this
My shepherd
My Lord
You have set a table for me in the sight of my foes
Oh God!
You have led me here
To partake of this meal in the middle of a battlefield
In the midst of a fight I did not choose
This
This is the fullness of life
Beyond the safety of a hillside pasture
Here
Through the high mountains and the bloodied valleys
You have led me
Here
Through the dry days and the desert
To flowing water and this meal
This is the last supper
In the sight of my foes
I am anointed
Sweet and sour
Salt tears and bitter
Honey and oil
I am sheep — led to the slaughter
I am sheep — no more
What lies beyond the gate?
I do not know
You whisper my name
You say
Enter – here is the house of my father
I close my eyes
I surrender
I tell myself
I will survive
I will live
Here
Today
Beyond the safety of a hillside pasture
In these high mountains and bloodied valleys
Through the dry days and the desert
I tell myself
I will survive
I will live
——————–
What if this had happened to you? Would you be as strong?
Reader and Writer - Praying Woman - Gardener - Foodie 
As we continue our Easter journey, I am amazed to find how things to fall in place and even seem to be re-emphasized, as if by coincidence or design. This was yesterday’s mass reading which I thought was intertwined with your meditation.
Like a sheep that is led to the slaughter-house,
like a lamb that is dumb in front of its shearers,
like these he never opens his mouth.
He has been humiliated and has no one to defend him.
Who will ever talk about his descendants,
since his life on earth has been cut short!
[Acts 8: 32-33]
But no, of course it’s not by coincidence nor by design.