Wrestling with Responsibility...

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately and I've come to grips with the fact that Uncle Ben was right, with great power comes great responsibility. In our world, power is not necessarily the ability to spin webs out of our wrists or to climb walls with our bare hands while wearing a skin-tight lycra suit but is rather, at least in some degree, an understanding or a grasp of knowledge as it comes our way. How can we bear witness to horrors of our world, both domestic and foreign, and not stand up in some way? How can those of us who call ourselves Christian do so even more, especially as we believe that we have in our hands and hearts the very antidote to all that ails this world? How can we see the AIDS crisis raging in Africa and stand idly by? How can we hear of the atrocities being done in Darfur and turn away from our television screens back to our prepackaged meals? We cannot. There is something to an exposure to suffering, to an exposure to truth, to an exposure to life, that almost holds one accountable to act. It's as though we have no choice. Whether it is an idea of deepening our spiritual journey, or of reaching out to help the fringe and marginal, the homeless and the hurting, the prostitute and the pusher, we must feel the compulsion to go. We cannot sit idly by. The only question that remains is, where do we start?