The thousand you scrolled past

One · What happened

A mountain let go, and the count keeps climbing

On the morning of 26 August, high on the Nepal side of the border, a slab of glacier and rock came down from around five thousand metres and dammed and then broke a river. The flood went down the Lhende Khola into Rasuwa district and on toward the Trishuli, taking bridges, a border crossing, hydropower works and whole stretches of road with it. On the Tibetan side it took a border town.

The numbers moved all week and they are still moving. This week Nepal's government had the dead above one thousand three hundred and the missing above five thousand. Chinese authorities, quoted by Reuters, counted hundreds of foreign nationals among the missing on their side alone, from more than twenty countries. Nobody has a final figure and it will be months before anybody does.

Two · What it is doing

You read it, and nothing happened inside you

Be honest about the order of events. The story came up between a football score and something about the election. You read the number. You may have said huh. Then you kept going, and by lunch it was gone, and if somebody had asked you that afternoon what happened in Nepal you might have had to think for a second.

That is most of us. Most of us also know, if we are honest, that it is not right. A second reaction shows up a few hours later, a small guilt about the first one. You felt nothing. Now you feel bad about feeling nothing, and if you look at the bad feeling for a second you will see it is about you. Nobody in Rasuwa gets anything from it. Then you go back to read a longer article so you can feel it properly, which mostly does not work either, and twenty minutes are gone on the thing with none of it reaching a single person who lost a house.

Some people post instead. They read the thousand and within an hour they have written something about how nobody is talking about this. The post is really about the poster. They know it. The knowing does not stop them, and most of us have done it at least once. The shrug and the post come out of the same place, a heart that has been handed something it cannot carry and wants to set it down as fast as it can.

You were made small. I do not mean that as an insult. A human heart was built for a household, a street, a congregation, a town, and it was never built to feel one thousand three hundred deaths at once. A phone that hands you a thousand deaths before breakfast is asking your heart to do something God did not design it to do. The numbness is a creature's numbness. The moral question is what you do in the ten minutes after it.

Three · Where the ground is

Jesus wept at one grave

John 11 has Jesus standing outside the tomb of one man, Lazarus, and the shortest verse in the Bible is right there. Jesus wept. He knew He was about to raise the man. He wept anyway. He wept for one man, with the man's sisters standing next to Him, at a grave in a village He had walked to on foot.

In my opinion that is the most useful thing in Scripture for a week like this. The Son of God, who knows every death in Rasuwa by name and by face, did not weep at a statistic when He was here. He wept at a grave He was standing in front of, and grief in the Bible is nearly always that close. Romans 12:15 says to weep with those who weep. The word is with, the kind of with that assumes you are in the room with the person doing the weeping.

The neighbor is the one in front of you

When the lawyer in Luke 10 asks Jesus who his neighbor is, hoping for a category, Jesus tells him a story about one man in a ditch and one man who stopped. The Samaritan did not feel the correct amount about robbery on the Jericho road in general. He bandaged the person who was there. That story gets quoted so often that we forget how small it is, just one road and one man bleeding in a ditch and one Samaritan with a donkey.

You cannot make yourself feel a thousand deaths, and pretending to is a lie of its own. What you can do is find out who is in front of you. Sometimes that turns out to be a Nepali family in your own town, or a man in your church whose cousin drives a truck on the Trishuli road. You would only find that out by asking. Sometimes the one in front of you is a rescue crew you can pray for, because prayer is how a small heart reaches a far place without pretending to be bigger than it is.

He is not numb

Psalm 56:8 says God has kept count of the psalmist's tossings and put his tears in a bottle. Every person under that water on 26 August was known to Him, and so is every person still under the mud tonight, by name, and nothing about the size of the number thins that out. God does not run out of attention at a thousand. I do. The load you cannot carry was never handed to you in the first place, and I find that a relief and a little humbling at the same time.

I will not tell you why God allowed a glacier to come down on a valley full of people. Scripture does not hand me that and I am not going to make one up. What it does say, in Luke 13, when Jesus is asked about a tower that fell on eighteen people in Siloam, is that the eighteen were not worse sinners than anyone else, and that the people asking should repent. He turned the question back on the ones still standing. I do not know a softer way to read it.

Four · Today

Five things, and none of them are “stay informed”

Your heart will be the same size tomorrow. Point what it has at somebody real.

1. 01

   Pray for the three men by their situation, since you do not have their names.

   Three workers came out of a tunnel alive after nine and ten days underground. Pray for their bodies, and pray for the crews still digging near them, tonight, before you sleep, on your knees if you can manage it. A small heart can reach Rasuwa that way.

2. 02

   Ask your pastor on Sunday whether anybody in the congregation has family in Nepal or Tibet.

   You might be surprised. If somebody does, you have found your man in the ditch. The Samaritan question stops being theoretical at that point.

3. 03

   Give once, through your church, and then stop reading the updates.

   Most churches already have a relief partner working there. Give a real amount, the kind you notice, and then close the story for good. Reading the twelfth update does nothing for anybody in Rasuwa.

4. 04

   Tell your kids what happened, in two sentences, at dinner.

   A mountain fell on some villages in a country called Nepal and a lot of people died and some men got rescued from a tunnel. Then pray with them for the families. Children can hold one thousand three hundred better than adults can, because they have not learned to scroll past it yet.

5. 05

   Go to the funeral you have been avoiding, or the hospital room.

   Somebody near you is grieving something smaller than a glacier. You have been meaning to go. Go this week. Weeping with the one who is weeping in front of you is what Romans 12 actually asks for. It is a lot harder than feeling bad about Nepal.