Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. (Matt. 5:4)

Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. (Rom. 12:15)

For God is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure. (Phil. 2:13)

I listen to the news every morning, wireless earphones clinging precariously to my head as I move in quick time through the morning hygiene and grooming routines. When I do it well, listening to the news is a spiritual discipline for me. I listen for the sorrows of the world, and for its joys.

All too often there is more sorrow than joy—more dead and wounded from bombings in Israel or Iraq, more child soldiers maiming and being maimed in West Africa, more working families ruined by corporate crimes like those of Enron or merely by the bad luck of the global labor market draw. It can go on for story after story.

I shed tears some mornings as I let my imagination feel its way, however slightly, into these soul-shattering events. A great temptation, one I frequently fail to resist, is to indulge a self-righteous rage against the perpetrators of all this pain.

It is not wrong, of course, to condemn the acts of terrorist bombers, adult exploiters of children, or corporate criminals. But when my rage serves mostly to draw a self-indulgent line between my humanity and their inhumanity, I need a reminder that we all are subject to the fallen powers of this world, all lost and in need of redemption.

The reminder comes when I am able to recollect the word of God as I have learned it through a lifetime of the Sabbath Schools and memory verses. It is then that I listen in the faith and hope telegraphed in Jesus’ words from the Mount of Blessing: "Blessed are they that mourn …"

Every now and then, like Thursday morning, September 25, 2003, my weeping faith is richly rewarded. That morning I heard NPR’s Carl Kasell announce that a Nigerian woman condemned to death had been acquitted. I knew her name—Amina Lawal—and some details of her story. Pregnant out of wedlock, she had been tried a year earlier under Islamic Shariah law and condemned to be stoned to death as soon as she had weaned her child.

I had wondered at the harrowing mixture of tenderness and terror that must have filled her as she nursed her infant daughter, the daughter’s every step toward toddler status meaning also a step toward her mother’s brutal, bloody execution.

Through Amnesty International, the prominent international human rights advocacy group, I had been a tiny part of a worldwide movement to intervene on behalf of Amina Lawal. So had the students and colleagues who joined me last year in starting the local Pacific Union College chapter of Amnesty International.

One the first things I did last summer as I returned from month away from my home in Angwin, California—a "city" of Adventists literally "set on a hill" well away from most of "the world"—was to e-mail our PUC Amnesty International group with an urgent appeal to sign a petition to Nigerian authorities to spare her life.

When I heard news of her acquittal, a wave of visceral joy surged up in me. I pumped my fist and almost shouted, "YES!!" aloud, suppressing the verbal outburst to keep from spraying the mirror with toothpaste. Amina Lawal’s freedom somehow had become, just a little, my freedom as well, her joy, my joy.

I cannot trace fully the process whereby my emotions have become so tied to the fates of people far away who do not know me. Belonging to organizations like Amnesty International certainly has helped.

However it happens, I welcome this strange expansion of my heart. It reminds me of what the seemingly routine educational grind on "the hill" can mean. Angwin may be a place set apart, but it can still be a place where we tune our hearts to know the pain and joy of all the world as it groans for God’s redemption.

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