In A Very Large Land

Last year we walked home one night in about this much rain. If we stayed toward the middle of the road the water came to just over the tops of our shoes. This all happened in the monsoon season but in 2008 the monsoon never came to Chennai. There was a cyclone late in the season and we saw a lot of destruction and suffering then. It was a blessing that the monsoon never arrived.

When you live in a big country you can be safe and a few states over "brothers and sister" have lost their homes in a cyclone. An earth quake can topple freeways and bridges near the Pacific and the plains states are peaceful. We are familiar with the ebb and flow of disasters over a large area. This morning our neighbors in the next state over reported two and a half million people homeless because of flooding. We are hot and dry and there two hundred have died because the Krishna River is higher that it has been in 106 years. I just couldn't post the picture of the woman sobbing because her home and what little she had was washed away. I couldn't post it but I will never forget the look in her eyes.

What is not familiar is we are at war. If I were home and one corner of my country was at war I would know it, think about it, pray about it, but here it is never mentioned. In Indian we are fighting communism and the communist are fighting back against capitalism and killing anyone who gets in their way. Whole villages disappear in the night and trains are blown up. Atrocities are committed and man's inhumanity to his fellowman rages. The Indian soldiers march through the jungles as they look for the enemy. They carry rifles on their shoulders and there is talk of accelerating the war. Some would call this an insurrection, but I remember from our history books at home that when some of our states fought against the government we called it war.
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