Can you believe the year we’ve just witnessed? It’s surely one for the books. In many ways it was a horrific year.

On the first day of the year a suicide bomber in Baghdad killed over twenty-five people who were attending a funeral for the victim of the previous attack. Two days later a car bomb detonated in Turkey. The year was received an infant baptism in blood.

There were warning signs last January. On the twenty-first the stock market plunged from fears of a coming recession fueled by the sub-prime mortgage crisis.

The second month was, in many respects, a repeat of the first. The first week of February witnessed a Palestinian suicide bomber detonating the bomb in a shopping center in Israel. A tornado killed fifty-eight people in the South: Iran launched a rocket into space. And the stock market plunged again with the Dow Jones falling 370 points. The British government nationalized a bank due to the bank’s financial crisis.

The financial crisis gave hint of things to come in March when food riots took place in some Third World Countries. The Palestinians and the Israelis went at it again spilling blood over the land both call holy.  April saw the Taliban attempting to assassinate Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

On the third day of May 133,000 were killed when the cyclone hit Burma/Myanmar, and on the twelfth day 69,000 died in the earthquake in Chengdu, China. In June the idiots were back at it; a car bomb exploded outside the Danish embassy in Pakistan; in July a suicide bomber drove an explosive filled vehicle into the front gates of the Indian embassy in Kabul. In July a series bomb blasts rocked Bangalore, India and other bombs killed and injured scores in Istanbul, Baghdad and Kirkuk. And the violence echoed throughout August.

In September Hurricane Ike made us wonder again about climate change and Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter Eleven bankruptcy protection. The bombers did not relent and sent a suicide truck bomb into the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan. And in October the U. S. Government signed the Revised Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, creating a 700 billion dollar fund to purchase the assets of failing banks. The financial crisis continued to spread as the government of Iceland took control of the country’s three largest banks. And in a demonstration of the Third World’s rising, India launched a spacecraft on a lunar exploration mission. The International Monetary Fund, European Union, and the World Bank extended a bailout package worth $25 billion to the nation of Hungary.

November saw the election of Barack Obama, the first African-American to become President giving a brief reprise from the continued problems shaking the globe.

In December I quit keeping up with these things in a fervent attempt to embrace the spirit of Christmas.

But all this stuff above is not the whole story. Doctors without borders bound up wounds and healed; Reverends and Imans and Rabbis sat down together to discover the commonality of their respective faiths. Thousands of volunteers labored in soup kitchens, and millions dropped dollars into the Salvation Army pot. A little group of young adults in California enlisted thousand of folks as I to make a total of $55 million in micro loans to third world entrepreneurs.

Now we’re peering over the horizon into 2009 where the challenge will be to make the items in the last paragraph more common than the others.