Wired Family Vacation--Weird Family Vacation?

Yesterday after church my husband and my middle daughter and I got in the car and drove about 500 miles to O'Fallon, Illinois. The drive was pleasant and easy. We shared delicious, home-made bread and wonderful chicken salad at a picnic at a rest stop--also some very tasty white cheddar.

We arrived at a motel about 9 pm and tried out three rooms before we got the rooms right. (One was not what had been advertised. We'd hoped for a two room suite so our 21 year old daughter could have some privacy from us and, okay, we from her. The second had two rooms and a brokensofa bed with no sheets or blankets for it in evidence. The third was a basic two-king room for about $40 less than we'd have paid for a suite. So chalk one up for family togetherness and saving money!) There is no agenda today. We are all enjoying some important unwind time. And we're letting time pass until this evening when we plan to go to a jazz and blues club for supper and some live music.

But we are doing it in a characteristically 21st century way. At the moment we are all sitting in a Starbucks with our laptops. Two of us have earphones in. I took a picture of the three of us with my iphone, just because I could.

So this is iconic of our wired, weird way of being a family, I guess....

Moral Outrage in a "Flat" World

Two mornings ago at Morning Prayer, one of us read the "wrong" reading, according to the Lectionary, moving us back a couple of chapters in 2 Corinthians, back into the place where Paul speaks so eloquently about the need for reconciliation, about God making his appeal through us, God's ambasadors. The Spirit clearly had a different agenda than the creators of the Lectionary, for this reading opened up among us a discussion of the solidarity and helplessness we feel with the women in the Sudan and in refugee camps in Chad, whose lives are in peril. These women fear rape and murder even in the camps that are supposed to offer them refuge.

We discussed their plight, agreed that they are our sisters and when they are hurting, WE are hurting. But we also felt like there was so little we could do from where we sit. We remember them, we tell their stories, we pray for them. What if we wrote letters to the US Ambassador to Chad? Where could we send money and be sure that it would make a positive difference? How do we support women and children here in our county and support women and children half a world away? What has happened to those men that they think they can treat women this way? How do we not just feel ourselves to be "fat cows of Bashan" here?