Hope in a fractured world

If you’re like me and follow the daily news, you could be forgiven for being overwhelmed by the evil that appears in our world today. So as an antidote here’s a poem by Eddie Askew, that offers hope in our fractured world.

Lord it’s easy to be discouraged

by all the pain and evil

I see in the world.

Easy to grow hard and cynical.

Paranoid.

Scanning each friendly word

for hidden criticism.

Taking the outstretched hand

and wondering what the other hand holds.

Throwing away the message of love

while I look in the envelope for its letter bomb.

So easy, Lord.

But in the quiet, with you, the thought comes-

if evil is so strong and wrong and powerful

why is there yet such goodness in the world?

There is one world, not two.

And the world that spins into darkness

is only half a turn from light.

And in the dark itself there are lights.

Flickering candles of hesitant flame,

persistent rhythmic neons of colour,

bright floodlights of electric intensity.

A white shining of hope.

And somehow

the darkness has no power to put it out.

“The light shines in the dark,

and the darkness has never quenched it.”