Prayers Are Encouraged

Commotion (noun): a state of confused and noisy disturbance; chaos, disorder, mayhem, unrest, uproar, tumult.

For those not keeping current with world events but who watch for signs of the last days, you can put a checkmark next to these two:

“The whole earth shall be in commotion” (D&C 45:26).

“The love of many shall wax cold” (Matthew 24:12).

Studies have shown there's actually a connection between those two scriptures -- that the “commotion” in the world is causing one form of love to “wax cold.” It is the feeling stemming from a moral obligation that prompts us to reach out and help when we see the suffering of others. But the greater and more widespread that suffering, the less people respond.

Every day we see reports of human suffering—victims of wars, genocide, terror attacks, torture, deadly epidemics, epic storms and earthquakes, and refugees leaving their homelands by the millions.

A 2011 study published by New York University School of Law showed that after being repeatedly exposed to scenes of mass suffering, the average person’s love and concern for the victims really does wax cold. But they don’t use those words. They use a term associated with a common reaction seen during the Holocaust: “psychic numbing.” The study showed that people are much more likely to feel indignation and act with compassion upon seeing a close-up image of just one person’s awful suffering. But when those same people see or hear reports that millions of people are suffering from that same dilemma, their feelings of concern go numb.

Writer Annie Dillard calls this “compassion fatigue.” She struggles to think straight about the great losses that the world ignores, saying: “More than two million children die a year from diarrhea and eight hundred thousand from measles. Do we blink? Stalin starved seven million Ukrainians in one year, Pol Pot killed two million Cambodians . . . At what number do other individuals blur for me?” (Dillard, “Head Spinning Numbers Cause Mind to Go Slack,” quoted in “Psychic Numbing and Mass Atrocity,” Paul Slovic, David Zionts, Andrew K. Woods, Ryan Goodman and Derek Jinks, August 2011, New York University School of Law, Public Law & Legal Theory Research Paper Series Working Paper No. 11-56).

This morning, the psychic numbness I may have shown toward the suffering of others stopped—at least temporarily—after I viewed a video showing the suffering of children in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan. They are victims of their own government’s horrible ethnic cleansing campaign. The stories and images truly haunt me. And even though they will haunt you too, I encourage you to watch the video http://nyti.ms/1fDhi2k

What goes through our minds when we see scenes like these? Do we just count our blessings and move right on, letting life and its many demands blot out those heart-wrenching images? Understandably, we’re not about to abandon everything and head a rescue mission to Sudan. But why not—at the very least—reach out and pray for the millions who suffer in so many very real ways—day after day. For many of them, this is life. For them there is no hope—no light at the end of the tunnel. Pausing to pray for them allows us to understand what Anne Morrow Lindbergh meant when she wrote, "My life cannot implement in action the demands of all the people to whom my heart responds." But at the very least, we can let our hearts respond in prayers for them.