The world is full of miserable places. One way of living comfortably is not to think about them or, when you do, to send money.

Tracy Kidder – Mountains beyond Mountains

Its 5:23 and the alarm on my cell phone is set to sound its melodious tune in 7 minutes, but I have been laying awake for the last 45. The house creeks under the dawn’s warmth. The last couple of nights the desert held its heat, the swamp cooler pumped sticky humid air all night and it feels better to get up than to fight the restlessness. I try to slip out of the room noiselessly, press some coffee, and sit down at the computer. I have a link on my Bookmarks Bar that says “News” and it is loaded with all of the local news sources. I open all of them in tabs and begin ripping through the headlines looking for the dirt. How many dead last night? How many more troops in the city? Anything about Colonia Palo Chino? God, I hope my mom doesn’t read these articles…

I used to do this to myself in the early mornings in Juarez. And as worn out as I am of hearing and reading about the violence in Juarez, I cannot ignore it. But like most miserable places on our planet, it does get ignored, forgotten, lost in the rank pile of ill news that is served up each day on our TVs, computers and kitchen tables. For a time, all I could think about was the war in our new city. I imagined how informed I was on the drug violence as I tore through several books on the subject and searched out new blogs covering the Borderland, Mexico’s cartels, and drugs. I even considered making a cartel time-line and sticking it to the wall; then I would be able to keep pace with the war. I am not sure what that is about me. I have always been a sucker for mobster films, and for  several years I had dreams about sitting down and picking Tarantino’s or Scorsese’s brain over a beer. Although my appetite for those films and stories has weakened significantly since moving to Juarez, something about that life intrigues me. The morning news would trap me in its dark hallways of violence and I could easily sit there for an hour, sipping coffee and reading the grueling details of a horrific history in Mexico, soaking up the bloody articles like a thirsty sponge. Misty stirring in the next room would usually flash me back to reality, bust me out of a dark world and release me to go on about my day. But there was always a filthy residue that would stick to me when I would walk away from that computer, and I would spend the next hours wondering why my spirit was heavy, why I felt so locked up inside.

The more I learned how deeply rooted and ancient the core of this war was that produced so much death in one city, the greater the burden settled on my spirit. It seemed that trying to do a single thing about the violence was like pushing a coal train uphill.

Somewhere along the line I clued in and began to allow God’s perspective to challenge the grime that was surrounding me. However well intentioned my previous pursuit of knowledge about this subject, I have adopted a new frame of mind, a new approach to staying informed about the facts that are so easily overwhelming. I don’t rush to the computer anymore to sift through the news like a ravenous dog, especially first thing in the morning. That may be obvious for most of you reading this blog, but I had never lived like this before; I had never lived surrounded by death and hopelessness, broken spirits, drug-addicts screaming and fighting in the street,  strangled bodies down the block. I had never been told before that people were talking about kidnapping us and that we needed to watch our backs.

I could literally see freedom from my rooftop, the border fence to a world of promise, yet I lived feeling like my hands were tied behind my back. This has been my reality for the past year and a half, and as bizarre as it is, love has bonded me to the Desert and her people. Everyone knows that Ciudad Juarez is not the charming South of the Border village that some country-folk artist might sing about, or even the enjoyable afternoon travel stop that it used to be, and the last thing that this city needs is another person bathing it in a hopeless light. For the next few posts I am going to be writing about our experiences living in “Baghdad on the Border” laced with bits of information about the War that is raging on our doorstep, but from love’s perspective.