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I simply can’t take it in. A thousand killed by ebola. A hundred women and children kidnapped in Iraq. Boys now taken in Nigeria. Palestinian families. Israeli teenagers. If I realised the enormity of it I would go mad.

A few years ago my daughter and I visited Senegal with the charity World Vision. In a tiny settlement we met a man who had fallen down a well and broken his hip. An accident, which in the West would have resulted in near full recovery, had left him seriously disabled, in permanent pain, his extended family without means to live, his wife dead of malaria for lack of a few pence for a mosquito net, his daughter destitute. I asked what it would take to make him whole. Two hundred pounds: an amount I might spend on a family holiday. But by the time I enquired I had left it too late to trace him. I suspect he will haunt me all my life.

Fifty thousand Yazidis without food and water. And yet the suicide of a single American actor fills our newspapers. One a statistic: the other a story. He is a Westerner like us; we can more easily relate to his pain. By contrast, it is far harder for us to imagine such desperate circumstances that we would lock ourselves inside a metal shipping container and risk terrifying death by asphyxiation.

Some time ago we took our young children to the West End production of Journey’s End. Though I already knew the play I left the theatre stunned to speechlessness. I could not dismiss these half dozen men, living through just three days of trench warfare, as make-believe characters, summoned up to portray the human condition but not real in themselves. This waste of life – the agony and mutilation and death and devastation which we witnessed in evocative detail over two hours – really happened, over and over again, in dugout after dugout, to men more real even than these. That dreadful conflict which broke out a hundred years ago this month, no longer to me a field of poppies symbolising a million anonymous dead. Now it is Captain Stanhope’s young fiancée, bereft of brother and future husband in one brief raid. It is Lieutenant Uncle Osbourne’s widow. It is young Jimmy Raleigh’s grieving mother. Their individual stories enabled me to see the war in all its horrific vividness, by being introduced to just a few people destroyed by it.

Jesus rescues one son from agonising mental torment. Heals one paraplegic at the appeal of his friends. Raises a dead daughter in response to one father’s despair. He seemed incapable of turning His back on any individual who appealed to Him, His capacity to heal and His compassion to help alike unable to resist.

So why, being God, doesn’t He solve all sorrow, all illness and hunger and death for ever?

Perhaps because being a person he responds to one person at a time. An example we can follow. We simply can’t relate to all the suffering in the world but we can help one person at a time.

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