My friend was comforted by today's passage in Luke, whenever he wondered whether *he* should have kept silent, to protect that empty peace his family wanted to preserve.

God gives us the vineyard and God asks us to care for it, and we respond .. as well as we can .. and the vineyard -the world -goes on looking pretty bitter. What goes wrong? Why is the kingdom of heaven .. why is true peace .. so far away?

Someone gave me a copy of Bill Gates' commencement address at Harvard this year. He talks about how profound is the injustice in the world, and is pleading with the new graduates to address it. He says "Humanity's greatest advances are not in its discoveries, but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity." One of his ideas is to develop what he calls a "more creative capitalism" - to "stretch the reach of market forces so that people can make a profit, or at least make a living, serving people who are suffering from the worst inequities. . " Shocking idea? Interesting? Hopeful?.  

He goes on, and this is the part that jumped out at me and that I particularly wanted to share with you:

I talk to skeptics who claim there is no hope. They say: "Inequity has been with us since the beginning, and will be with us till the end - because people - just ... don't .. care.

I completely disagree [says Bill Gates]. I believe we have more caring than we know what to do with. All of us here . . . at one time or another, have seen human tragedies that broke our hearts, and yet we did nothing - not because we didn't care, but because we didn't know what to do. If we had known how to help, we would have acted.

The barrier to change is not too little caring; it is too much complexity.

"The barrier to change is not too little caring; it is too much complexity." I breathed a huge sigh of relief when I read that sentence. It doesn't solve anything. It just helps me understand what it going on. Because I know how much I care and I know how much you care. And I've always wondered why, with so much caring in the world, is there still so so much injustice?