It was a morning of two back-to-back speaks on behalf of the United Way yesterday. I had just finished my first talk when a woman walked up to thank me. “Your talk really touched me,” she said. And she began to cry.

“Breathe,” I told her quietly. “Big deep breath.”

She took a big shaky breath and kept talking. “It’s just I moved here three years ago from,” and she named a former Communist Bloc country. “I too had such an experience and what you said is so true. We have to help people when they fall.”

I use the story of the ‘bad man’ and falling on the road to hell as the foundation of my United Way talk. I use it to demonstrate that people fall, but when there’s a net to catch them, the fall doesn’t kill them. And, when caught in caring arms, it’s easier to stand back up again and walk free.

The woman and I chatted for a few moments. She told me about working with immigrant women to help them acclimatize to their new homeland, and to help them put their pasts into perspective.

I thought about what she may have experienced in her homeland. What so many of these women from foreign lands experience every day in the name of war blasting through their country under the guise of freedom.

As I drove back downtown I listened in on a conversation on CBC RAdio’s, The Current, as Anna Maria Tremonte interviewed people about sexual abuses in Syria, where, as happens in so many conflicts, rape is used as a weapon of war.

Lauren Wolfe, the Director of Women Under Siege, a project on sexualized violence and conflict at the Women’s Media Centre founded by feminist Gloria Steinem in New York spoke about the shame that befalls a woman who is raped. How she is cast out, or married off if a man takes her body out-of-wedlock. She talked about women being forced to build their own huts and having to live alone on the edges of her village. About being stoned. Being thrashed. Being shunned.

Rape is a cheap way to wage war. Through rape, the entire community is destroyed by shame. And when you destroy community, you gain control and have a better chance of winning the war.

And I was saddened. Infuriated. Confused.

I know this is happening in our world today and I don’t want to know this is happening in our world today. And that is the problem. My not wanting to know is not making the kind of difference I want to make in the world.

And I thought about the woman who came up to speak to me after my talk. What courage. What commitment. What hope.

I may not be able to stop rape in villages on the other side of the world. I may not be able to prevent war or make peace in foreign lands, but right now, right here, I can decide to be the peace I want to create in the world. I can make choices to activate my capacity to make a difference, to be courageous, to be committed to create hope where none exists.

There is so much we can do right here, right now to make a difference.

We can volunteer. We can speak up. We can write our government representatives and tell them what we want them to do about poverty, justice, affordable housing, and yes, the abuse of women everywhere. We can take action.

Sitting here at my desk on a somewhat snowy morning in Calgary, it’s hard to imagine that right now a woman is being raped, a child is being abused, a bullet is being fired. And yet, somewhere in the world, this is so.

The biggest challenge of our age is not that it is happening, it is that we believe we are powerless to do anything about it.

I can’t, nor do I want to, fly around the world to areas of high conflict. I’m not trained nor qualified to step into a war zone and make a difference.

What I am qualified to do is make a difference from where I sit this morning, right now. What I am capable of doing is to use the tools at my disposal to give voice to what is happening in the world around me and to ensure whatever I do, I am not contributing to conflict, to abuse, or war.

I can be my best at being a peace-maker by creating peace through every act and every breath. Like the woman who spoke with me after my talk, I can give back to ensure there is a net to catch people when they fall, and caring arms to help them get back up again.

What about you? Are you willing to make a difference by taking action?

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