I am an optimist. I always have been and I think I always will be.  I typically think this is a positive attribute to have. I don't understand when people see this as a problem.  That, somehow, because I'm looking at the world with "rose-colored glasses" that means I can't see reality. I am somehow ignorant of the biased media; or that I don't fully understand what evil there is out there in the world; or that I am uneducated about the happenings of other countries. Let me be very clear-- I know what the reality is. 

I will never forget the day my mind was first opened to the reality of child abuse. I was probably in middle school. I read about two parents who were going to jail because they whipped their boy with an electrical cord, burnt him with cigarette butts.  I will never forget when I learned about the genocide in Darfur. I was 16 years old. I saw pictures of the villages completely burned to the ground. I will never forget the day on my mission where I heard first hand accounts of two women who were sexually assaulted  I will never forget the day I visited the Genocide Memorial in Rwanda and saw the skulls and bones of countless people slaughtered.  I will never forget the day one of my 6th graders asked me what a "slut" meant because a few of her classmates were calling her that.

I am not ignorant of the world. I have lived in third world countries. I have seen poverty that most Americans cannot imagine. I have visited a mother and daughter living in a one-roomed shack smaller than the bedroom I'm currently sitting in; their only source of income being the tiny stand of a few vegetables and candies the only sold outside their home. I have met orphans whose families were killed in unspeakable ways by the LRA. I have met people who remember the days of the military coup in Ghana where they feared to walk around in case they got caught by some soldiers carrying the wrong voting card. I have read books, cross-referenced articles, watched documentaries, written papers (for I did study international development and anthropology in college) on the lives of women, children, men around the world facing conditions beyond imagination.

The hardest thing about knowing is the weight it adds to your soul. Make no mistake: I very much feel the weight of the world on my shoulders. I have been so troubled that I sob myself to sleep. I have been so overwhelmed that I question the very existence of a loving God.  I have been so angry that my hands shake and my heart feels it will leap out of my chest. I could let these emotions overpower me.  I could raise my voice by spewing words of hate against the acts committed by hundreds. I could join others in their diatribes about the evils of the world; I could join the ranks of those hating. But I will not. Some think it is a mark of courage, but there is no strength in hating.  The world needs to realize that it doesn't matter if you are hating something that is wrong-- it is still hate. I will not apologize for refusing to join the ranks. No, I will turn my anger, my sadness, my emotions into something better. I will turn them into love because to the very depths of my soul, to the very core of my being I believe in the power of love.