Escape is never an answer to the chaos, and pain, that affronts the tranquilities of life.  We may want to believe that relaxing on some beach on a distant island isolates us from the world's wounds.  And, in our imagination, such a perceived peaceful existence will offer us a temporary absence from the horrors of murder and the suffering of loss.  But lives abandoned to isolation, and remoteness, are lives lived outside of humanity.  If we choose to live life beyond the needs of others, without the opportunity to bring healing and provide comfort, how can we expect to grow as human beings?  How can we ever expect to discover "the light beyond the darkness" if we never struggle, nor confront, nor experience .... the cold, painful depth of an icy well?

 "When our fantasies of a better life consume us, when our memories of
 past hurts bind us and fears of pending calamity drive us, we are robbed
 of the only gift — the greatest gift — we can be sure of possessing: the
 present moment.  We cannot summon the future, we cannot remake the past. 
 The present moment is the unfinished house in which we dwell."⁶

And yet, in this unfinished all-too-human dwelling, as we face the chaos, the hurt, the tragedies of human life .... we will come to know Compassion, and Comfort, and Gentleness, and Healing.  We will come to know Security, and Confidence, and Trust.  We will come to know, and to see, God.  We will feel His Presence among us — for He lives among us.  And He lives within us.

 "It is not struggle that destroys us.  It is the unwillingness to move
 beyond struggle even when the struggle goes on forever.  We don't forget
 abandonment.  We still feel the flames of jealously.  We still resent
 bitterly their new partner.  We know we are divorced but refuse to be
 separated.... Exhaustion is what happens when we refuse in our pain to
 look for ways to bring light into darkness.  When we allow pain to consume
 us, to paralyze us, to nail our feet to the floor of the place where
 defeat has happened, danger sets in with a vengeance....It is not the
 struggle itself that kills us.  It is allowing ourselves to stay locked
 in mortal combat with it.  The refusal to move on in life to where God
 waits for us with new love."⁷

The present moment will always remain the unfinished house in which we live.  A house with challenges and struggles and broken walls and crumbling ceilings.  But it is not a house that we occupy alone.  "God is the One who made for us a good world [... a secure house] and who walks with us to hold us up as we go.  And sometimes, in the face of the God of life, the most faithful thing we can do is simply to keep on living."⁸