The end of Ignorance

I remember my life before I acknowledged poverty and genocide and murder and corruption. I remember how easy it was to sleep at night and to turn off the news and to turn my head when injustice was being done. Then the day came that I suddenly acknowledged the pain of the world, the brokenness that abounds in every corner of the globe. What was my life before this realization? I was blissfully ignorant and perhaps sometimes I long for that ignorance again. The fact of the matter is that I cannot now be blind to the world and I cannot now say that I will live in any manner of the ''American dream" as it is so known and sought after. My American dream will happen in years to come as I first teach children who no one else will love, and it will continue as I bring children into my family who do not look like me and who have experienced things that no one should ever know. My family will live in Africa and we will be the refuse of the world, no white picket fence for Ben and I. Rather we may be shot at and we may not live in peace and without fear but the call of this life is not to live safe and not to live comfortable; it is to live without abandon and without reserve. In a few years we will abandon our nice apartment and comfortable jobs with a cereal aisle as long as the eye can see for a life much less safe and much less conventional. Truth be told, ignorance is not bliss because deep down the suffering of the world is in each of our hearts, we may be able to ignore it in our minds but our hearts can sense things that we never imagined to be so.