Yelizaveta Nadolniak
…and the Quiet
I read the news today… Oh Boy.
I suspect, those of us who read the news, have a love hate relationship. Curiosity is something no human can escape. Then again, it did kill the cat.
Yelizaveta, a four year old severely burned victim from Ukraine, moved to Poland (God bless that country forever), could not understand the quiet. “Where is the music?”
The music she was referring too was the sound of bombs, sirens and explosions.
Her story in today’s Free Press and the picture captured by the Press, cut me to the quick, my core and my heart. Though I admit this is easily done to me, being a millennia long celt with a large dose of Lithuanian, I am suspect to stories ‘of the heart’.
Yelizaveta took me over the edge. I glanced at other headlines, mostly about how people in our government wanting to cut ‘entitlements’, reducing funds for the neediest under the umbrella of the unsubstantiated fear of increasing the ‘national debt’.
Like the one I paid more into for thirty years and need to live to at least one hundred plus to finally not ‘foot the bill’ and receive needed professional medical treatment and in most of my cases, life saving. I will never get out what I put in to Social Security,
I’ve made close to seven decades here on this planet. I’ve seen this ‘debt ceiling’ scenario play over and over and over and over about the ‘National Debt’.
For example, in the last administration budget estimates showed that actually add at least $8.3 trillion, increasing the U.S. debt to $28.5 trillion by 2025.1 But the national debt reached that figure much sooner. The national debt stood at $19.9 trillion when President Trump took office in January 2017, and it reached a high of $27 trillion in October 2020… Source: New Balance
And since…
The current administration reduced a $1.7 trillion figure to the deficit, a figure corroborated by Treasury reporting... Source: News Week
And in addition…
Congress has raised the debt ceiling fourteen times from 2001 to 2016. The debt ceiling was raised a total of seven times (total increase of $536.5 bill) during 2001-2009 and it was raised 11 times (as of March 2015 a total increase of $649,8 bill) during 2009-2017. Source: Source: "Analysis of 2011-2012 Actions Taken and Effect of Delayed Increase on Borrowing Costs" (PDF). GAO. July 2018.
And then I went back and read again about Yelizaveta. I put myself first into the burning building she was pulled from; the stench of fear chalked full of the smells of copper (blood), burned flesh, smoke of all kinds, yelling and screaming… Then her evac, and finally her hospital and the ensuing months she’s spent there. Yup, closed my eyes and ‘put myself’ in a hospital room six thousand miles away.
In contrast, us, ‘the greatest country’, cannot agree that our neediest citizens need us. And by our ‘views’, or maybe more precise our ‘judgement’, turn a blind eye on the person the Good Samaritan took take of, by the side of the road.
Where has our love gone?
Where has His love in us gone?
I know that many of us have resigned ourselves to the ‘state of affairs’.
This is the worst.
I used to think there were three kinds of Catholics. 1) Those who blindly follow the lead of those who have betrayed our children 2) Those who’ve said, “I am out of here. This is a bunch of ‘hocus pocus’.” Someone very close to me often bragged about the ‘hocus pocus’ thing, making it and it’s church the brunt of ire that brought out more than a few jokes and 3) Those who’ve stayed to fight it out, to fight the good fight, to finish the race (and you do not need to ‘win’), to go and pick up the half dead stranger by the side of the road.
So I took Yelizaveta, placed her in my heart, finding a secure spot for her forever, where I will remember her and pray for her daily.
People so vastly underestimate the power of prayer. It IS the most powerful weapon we have by far, exceeding any medical treatment (as great as these are for many of us) and so many of us just don’t realize all we have to do is have a conversation with our dear Lord, Master, Savior, Son of our Father.
How hard can that be?
And then we forget about our intercessor, Mary, mother of our God, the Patron of our Country, the country that is still the ‘greatest’, but not if we continue to overlook those in greatest need.
I am so grateful I ‘met’ Yelizaveta this morning. Not only did she restore my faith in humanity, but also did the Polish and the Ukrainians.
I pray, hope and plead ceaselessly that our country, who my Dad virtually gave his life for, where out of the eighteen hundred guys in his unit who left here on a boat on a trip to the Philippines in September 1941, ordered by his President illegally, only eight hundred (maybe) returned…
Realize what we are, and what we can do, for each other and every single person created in His Image and Likeness.
Please Lord, help us. Plead with the Father for us. Great mother of God, ceaselessly intercede for us.
Amen