Here’s where I am right now, she said.
I need a reason to go on.
Does anything I do or say or write
make any difference,
or fix what’s wrong?

Platitudes and preaching,
sermons and lectures
from the “experts” –
aren’t helping or healing
or making anything better.

Why am I here? she asked.
The age-old question.
I see cruelty, selfishness, greed, hate
going unchecked. I see evil rewarded,
and true heroes unsupported,
and the unfairness of it is killing me.

I see and hear people who I thought
were my friends saying the most
hateful things – condoning murder
and torture – with faces that show
no remorse, or recognition of the rot
of civilization.

I feel like I’m in the land of the walking
dead, she said, like the zombies
are already here among us,
with their bland and placid faces
reciting the lies they’ve been fed.

I feel hopeless, she said.
Hopeless and helpless,
mourning the loss of decency,
and kindness, of honesty
and intelligence and grace.
I need a reason to go on, she said.

And the Cosmos answered:
Love.

-Karen Molenaar Terrell

“There is a large class of thinkers whose bigotry and conceit twist every fact to suit themselves. Their creed teaches belief in a mysterious, supernatural God, and in a natural, all-powerful devil. Another class, still more unfortunate, are so depraved that they appear to be innocent. They utter a falsehood, while looking you blandly in the face, and they never fail to stab their benefactor in the back. A third class of thinkers build with solid masonry. They are sincere, generous, noble, and are therefore open to the approach and recognition of Truth.”
-Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 450