blood
An illustration of blood donation by Mitchell Atencio/Sojourners. Original arm image by Kazuo ota, original rainbow image by Rafael Garcin, via Unsplash.
In the summer of 2009, when I was 12 years old, a street racer crashed into my grandparents' minivan. The accident, by all means, should have killed my grandad, who was in a coma for several weeks after the crash. While undergoing emergency surgeries, he lost 98 units of blood in six hours — about the blood of 10 people. They were pumping blood into him as fast as it was coming out. Ever since that day, blood donation has held a place close to my heart.
Pricked finger, Chris G. Walker / Shutterstock.com
Don’t you hate it when you accidentally slice the tip of your finger on one of your knives and the cut is deep enough to draw blood? Or when one of the cats gets a little too playful with the claws and you’re soon looking for a bandage?
Nobody likes to bleed, even though bleeding is part of life. To live is to bleed. If we’re not bleeding, we’re not living.
We all bleed lots of times, in lots of ways. We skin our knees and scrape our emotions. We often have to head for the medicine cabinet for a bandage. Sometimes, we feel like we need a tourniquet.
There are the little, daily cuts that we all get. Someone says something that hurts our feelings. Something doesn’t turn out the way that we’d hoped, and we get discouraged. A project that we’ve invested so much of ourselves into gets rejected, and we feel rejected, too.
It happens all the time.
Sometimes, we wind up with a deep spiritual cut that needs to be stitched closed with the help of others. A relationship ends. A job disappears. A tumor appears. A storm blows through our neighborhood and destroys what we’ve built over the years.
I admire those who learn not only to accept the blood-stained moments, but to embrace them. They develop a capacity to see beyond the momentary hurt. They recognize that bleeding is part of the grand process of life.
And they bleed joyfully.
(Mila Supinskaya / Shutterstock)
Yes, his blood was on us once,
making us famous blades within the blades
community. I mean, many of us
had taken blood and sweat before
from lions and dogs and even fallen birds
or lovers and killers and the killed
but this was the first time we took both
at the same time, from the same creature.
You humans have that saying,
Blood, sweat, and tears. By this you signify work.
Consider the lilies of the field, he said
of our cousins. They neither work nor spin
but I tell you that not even Solomon
in all his glory was clothed like them.
(mozakim / Shutterstock)
THERE ARE DAYS, to tell the truth, that you just have to wonder if it’s worth it to try to live in community. It’s sort of like marriage and family life: It’s a great idea, but the reality requires more blood, sweat, and tears than anybody ever told you about ahead of time. And sometimes you just wonder.
You stir a soup pot, and it seems there are always more hungry people at the door. You open the shower line, but more hot, sweaty, dirty bodies appear the minute you’ve finished. You visit the prisoners, but for every visit there are five more unaddressed needs. You work to devise strategies to stop the death penalty, and the state just sets another execution date. You sit down to pray, but the cacophony of your thoughts and feelings won’t lie still long enough to get through a simple “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner."
If you buy your candy in the United States, chances are that your treats are filled with more than sugar and empty calories. They also may hold the blood, sweat, and tears of an African children who should be in elementary school rather than slaving in cocoa fields.
Some clever folks have created a magnificent "mash-up" of Sesame Street's resident pastry enthusiast, Cookie Monster, and the iconoclastic performer Tom Waits' song "God's Away on Business" from his 2002 album, "Blood Money." (Waits' song also appeared in the 2005 film, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room.)
"I will call them my people, who were not my people. And her beloved, who was not beloved." (Romans 9:25 referencing Hosea 2:23)
Estranged, alienated, and removed; anyone living in an industrialized modern society in the 21st century would be able to define, or at least identify the sentiments of these words. Our time is one of mass communication and instantaneous access to knowledge. And yet our lives are too compartmentalized, increasingly divided, and our society reflects this. Indeed the existential writers of yesteryear were correct in diagnosing the iron cage that would befall us, ultimately leading to an eclipse of reason.
Last summer's financial reform bill included something the world has long needed: a requirement that electronics manufacturers disclose whether their products include conflict minerals from Congo. Money from conflict minerals helps fund militias' reign of terror and rape in the country's eastern region. (See activist site Raise Hope for Congo's listing of how 21 leading electronics companies are doing at voluntary disclosure -- no one gets a gold star, but some are worse than others. Yeah, we're talkin' to you, Nintendo.)
Recently, Wikileaks, an online whistleblower site, released a video which was dubbed "Collateral Murder." I write as a former member of the Infantry c
A comment on my recent blog about The Hurt Locker really got my blood boiling.
Something sort of mystical and magical happened after a 19-year-old kid named Papito was killed on our block a few weeks ago. As our neighborhood ached and grieved and cried with his family, we began to create a memorial for Papito where he died
At about midnight we heard the shots ring out. My friend ran to the door and I heard him yell, "Shane, a kid has been shot, come down." As we looked down the street we could see a young man staggering as he walked down our block. Then his knees gave out and he fell to the ground. We called for an ambulance and ran outside to be with the boy.