some author whose name unfortunately escapes me once commented that humans' big brains and dextrous hands have cause us centuries of suffering and destruction. war. politics. religions. hate. murder. rape. technology. industrialization.
somehow i can't seem to get the image of 160 shining faces looking at me from their seats in my classroom, anxiously awaiting my spoken directions and gestures as to what we would be learning for the day in english class. i think of the games i played with kids, the walls i painted for the children's home, the words i repeated persistently, all the countless gestures and movements and expressions we made with our hands to try and desperately communicate with one another when our words fell short of meaning or comprehension. i think of all the ways we touched, pointed, tickled, screamed, engineered, and planned as we spend hours with the children, teachers, fathers, pastors, mothers, and merchants of thailand. if not for our big, complicated brains, would we be able to speak or have the ingenuity of creatively connecting with one another? if not for our hands, the same no matter what size, shape, or color, would we have had a medium for telling and showing these kids our love, our personalities, our stories and theirs? suffering will always exist, for the human race is incredibly primitive, selfish, and at times far away from god.
yet goodness, joy, beauty, and communion with god is the ultimate progosis for us homosapiens, and if not for our brilliantly engineered bodies and minds, we would have very little capacity to know, to relate, to build, to create, to embrace and imagine...to be...human
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