Christmas 2005

Your Guardian Angels

God will protect you
With the wings of his angel
Under which you can find refuge
When the terror of the night is haunting you.
Flee under his wings
If the arrows that fly by day are hunting you.

Because God has charged his Angels
To protect you
And surround you and never leave you
In all your ways of life.

If it must be
They will bear you on their hands
In times of trouble and sorrow.
When your steps have become tired
And your head is heavy,
His Angels will help you up again
And you will see,
That your life has become light again.

Uwe Seidel, according to psalm 91,11

Dear friends of our Shanti family,

For each of us, the look back to the year having passed will be a different one.
But if we look beyond our personal sphere, it is the awful natural disasters which we immediately have before our eyes, from the devastating tsunami to the hurricanes in America to the Pakistani earthquake. I think it is not very often that so many disasters have sought out Earth in one single year.

When Lisbon was destroyed by the big earthquake in 1755 and tens of thousands of people were killed, the whole of Europe was changed in its image of the world and of God – although no TV was able to broadcast horrendous pictures to the living-rooms.
A message took days to reach people in those times. And the people were unable to convert their distress into help as promptly as today.

This is what impresses me most in all these horrors. Much too often, I hear complaints that our planet had become such a cold and unloving place. I would rather hold against that that I personally see and experience much spontaneous help, solidarity and charitable compassion.

I see it in the immediate catastrophe aid provided for disaster victims and of course in the devoted help for individual projects. In fact, we have now been living in the Shanti station for more than 13 years, thanks to your sisterly help from you – our friends – and the patients and the many children know one thing for sure: It’s the friends in Germany who are responsible that they are still living.

This year was, to say it with the words of Queen Elisabeth, an "annus horribilis" – a year full of horror if I only think of political history.
On 1 February, the King took over absolute regency and announced that the Mao’s terror could only be defeated with military force, which means some more blood shedding.
This makes me think of Bertha von Suttner, the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize. She was so right in saying: Nobody will be as unreasonable to clean ink with ink or oil with oil. But still they want to clean blood with blood.

How can we find a way to live under such a theme and love without letting us be defeated too much?