Haiti: Looking backward

As I review the two years that have passed since Haiti experience a magnitude-7 earthquake, the millions of dollars in aid that has been delivered and the thousands of hours spent by volunteers and relief-workers, I must admit, I am disheartened. Two years have passed with very few measurable successes. Millions of citizens are still displaced, living in temporary housing that has long since become unsafe. Much of the promised aid has been clogged in the bureaucratic pipelines. A deadly cholera outbreak has taken nearly 7,000 lives and the number of abandoned children is steadily growing.

With two formerly ousted leaders, Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier and Jean-Bertrand Aristide returning to Haiti during the controversial presidency of newly elected Michel "Sweet Mickey" Martelly, along with accusations against UN appointed peacekeeping forces, the political and civil discord is likely to continue for some time.

Haiti is, as they say, a hot mess.

But this year, instead of talking about what is going on in Haiti's present, I thought it appropriate to take a look into Haiti's past. See, we as the "benevolent" saviors of Haiti have no hope of making sense of the situation in Haiti, let alone develop a successful plan for recovery unless we understand the history of this tiny, conflicted country.

In July 2002, I visited Haiti for the first time with a mission team from my church. We sent two more teams during 2003 and were planning more trips when Pastor Joseph, our contact in Haiti, warned us not to come. It wasn't safe, he said. Remembering the Haiti that I had visited two years prior, I recalled that it didn't feel particularly safe then either. I had no idea what had happened to make things suddenly unsafe, something about riots and political unrest.

I was 17 and had trouble understanding my own government.

During my last trip to Haiti, I spoke to a Haitian man about the recent presidential elections and as during that conversation, he brought up Haiti's tumultuous political history. The conversation stuck with me after I returned and I started looking into some of the events of the past 20 years in Haiti. It's a fascinating and disturbing study.

I discovered that, in February of 2004, less than a year after our last mission trip, a rebel army took control of the northern part of Haiti, including Port-au-Prince, resulting in the a violent coup d'etat. Reports surrounding this event are rife with speculation, accusation and conflicting reports and general political unrest. The ousted president, Jean Bertrande Aristide was exiled to South Africa.

Not safe, indeed.

In 2005 Baraka Production released a documentary on the 2004 coup called Aristide and the Endless Revolution. If you're interested in watching the film, it is available for $13 on Aristidethefilm.com (I haven't watched it yet). The trailer is below.

Live58 Challenge

This video was made about 4 weeks ago, right after I got back from my Haiti trip with Compassion International. Compassion is involved with Live58, a coalition of nonprofit organizations dedicated to ending poverty by practicing a "True Fast." True fasting, as described in Isaiah 58, is characterized by loosing the bonds of wickedness, undoing heavy burdens, letting the oppressed go free, breaking every yoke, sharing your bread with the hungry, bringing the poor cast-out ones into your home and covering the naked. 

More than anything it is a call to love and have compassion on one another. This passage, the Live58 ministry, and my trip to Haiti raised some questions about how we respond to pain and poverty.

Newton's First Law of Social Change: Balanced Forces

On Friday, I talked about why I believe we can't set out to solve world problems.

As I was thinking about the immeasurable size of these issues, for some sadistic reason, God chose to speak to me through physics. I don't really like physics.

I don't get physics. Or chemistry. Or subtraction. I get nouns and verbs, so it would make sense that God would speak to me through grammar or sentence structure. But no, not today. God spoke to me through Newton's three laws of motion.

Newton's First Law: Balanced Forces

The motion (or lack of motion) on an object will not change so long as the forces on it are balanced.

In other words, something will not move until something moves it and the force that moves it has to overcome the sum of the forces keeping it in place.

These forces include social and cultural norms, political corruption, international and in-country conflict, a lack of human rights, limited natural resources and environmental issues, poor farming and business practices, lack of education, and many others.

These problems are not few and they are not easy to change.

Do you see why I might say that you, individually, cannot set out to solve world problems?

Another force to consider is apathy. We often assume that "not caring" is neutral, but it is not; it is a force against change. I don't think it's fair to rage against all the people in the world who "don't care," and, honestly, it would be hypocritical. The truth is that most people are not so cold as to be unemotional about the death of a child (or many other issues), it is not as simple as "not caring."

So, really, why aren't people part of the force saving that child rather than the part perpetuating his death?

The answer is different for each person. Maybe they are unaware of it, maybe they do not know how to help, maybe they do not trust the organizations in place to combat poverty. It is likely the weight of all the other worries in an individual's life drawing their attention away from the problem of poverty.

Many are simply so discouraged by the size of the problem, that they do nothing.

Do you see why I might say that you, individually, cannot set out to solve world problems?

You will become discouraged before you even begin.

And so you should! The solution to these complex issues, essentially, requires participation every single person on the planet both individually and how they work together.

Don't you see why I might say that you, individually, cannot set out to solve world problems?

The force required is to great for one person. 

It important to recognize the overwhelming size of these issues. When you oversimplify issues like poverty, world hunger, human trafficking, homelessness, war, and the marginalization of women, you don't approach them effectively and you will become discouraged when you do realize how huge they are.

We have to focus on the things that we can do to be part of the force combatting this issues, rather than abstract ideas like "ending hunger," because we cannot end hunger, but we can teach farmers in Rwanda more effective ways of growing coffee. We cannot end human trafficking, but we can rescue this child from prostitution.

We cannot end infant mortality, but we can rescue one child.

By partnering with others to discover the smaller pieces making up impossibly complex issues and by focusing on the immediate, achievable goals in front of you, you can combat the larger issues. 

The important thing is to recognize the hugeness of the problem but to focus on the one thing that you can do and commit to doing it.

We can't save the world but we can do something.

TOMS: A Day Without Shoes

My feet are famous!

It is one thing to post something online or to say that something is a good idea, but it's something quite different to do it. I'm embarrassed by how hard this was! All it cost was a bit of my pride and warm feet, how easy is that?

Apparently, for me, not very.

Why We Hate the Poor

"The poor man is hated even by his neighbor but the rich man has many friends."
Proverbs 14:20

"What do you mean, we 'hate the poor?' We don't hate the poor; we're Christians, we wrote the book on this stuff!" It is true that Christians, more than many, have an intense awareness of poverty and feel a greater social obligation to help the poor, Ghandi notwithstanding. But there is a big difference between helping the poor and loving the poor.

In fact, part of the reason that giving to charity feels so good is that it reaffirms our distance from poverty. We prove that we are not poor by giving to them out of our wealth. The last thing we want to do is jump into the squalor and live with them. The last thing we want to do is identify with the poor man.

Now, hate is a very strong word, one we like to put on par with words like "murder," and rightfully so:

 "Whoever hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him." 1 John 3:4.

But, consider for a moment the way we view poverty. This issue is not quite so simple as giving to charity or feeling bad for the dying children in Uganda. It is not so simple as voting a particular way. This hate is much more insidious, its roots go deep into our humanity and is closely tied to what we believe to be true about God's role in pain and suffering.

When we see an individual living in squalor, we are intensely uncomfortable; our instinct is to run away. We try desperately to find a reason for their situation: they didn't work hard enough, they picked a bad industry, they made bad decisions, they aren't willing to work beneath themselves, they like getting unemployment or welfare. Or we explain what we would do differently in that situation. Or we simply try to think about it as little as possible, anything to distance their existence from our own. To prove to ourselves that we could never be in that same position.

There's a story we love to forget in John 9 when Jesus and his disciples encounter a man who had been blind his entire life. The disciples asked Jesus whether it was for his own sins or the sins of his parents that he had been so cursed with this disability. Jesus rocked their world with his response: 

"It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him. We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming, when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world." John 9:3-5

We see the same thing in the story of Job. Job's friends saw his death-defying plunge from a place of wealth, blessing, and honor to sitting in the dust scraping his sores with a shard of broken pottery. They could not bear the idea that God would do this to a good man, so they turned on Job and tormented him with their ignorant piety. They turned him into a bad man so they could deal with the pain, poverty, and suffering in his life.

But Jesus doesn't let them off the hook, "Not so fast!" He says, "This guy isn't blind because he's a sinner, He's blind because I chose to make him blind." He then explains that there is something greater than this man's plight at work here. He pulls the focus off of the blind man and says, "This here? This is about ME." 

By making suffering His own action rather than a reaction to something we've done, he takes control away from us and puts us all on the same level. And that's a scary thing. But until we can freely acknowledge that God has absolute control in our lives and in the lives of those around us, we cannot experience Him fully. We are trapped by our own fear in a static, legalistic existence and can never truly experience His grace.

We elevate to sainthood those who have chosen to suffer and die for the sake of the Gospel. Foxe's Book of Martyrs is just a tiny fraction of the more famous martyrs and those stories alone are overwhelming. But what about those who, like this man, never made that choice? We may be able to shake off a bit of the discomfort by saying that he, no doubt, was a sinner and was able to understand the amazing miracle that had taken place in his life.

But what about the children born into poverty who are never given the knowledge or the resources to overcome their circumstances?  What about the babies dying of AIDS? What about the millions of broken men and women who have been afflicted with poverty, pain, and disease who, instead of experiencing healing and rejoicing in the glory of God manifested in their life, turn their backs on Him?

These are the kinds of questions that make us squirm when non-Christians ask them. These are the questions we don't particularly like to ask when we are Christians. We like to respond with affirmations of God's goodness and omniscience, but it is not good enough to shrug off the discomfort and move on, God doesn't let us off the hook so easily. God is not satisfied with that, He wants use to jump headlong into that frightening place where things simply do not make sense...

...and to stay there.

So what happens when, instead of blaming the poor for their poverty, ignoring the problem, instead of making our monthly donation we hang out with them in their poverty? What happens when we take that burden of suffering, doubt, confusion, and frustration upon ourselves?

It changes us.

Don't think so? Ask Richard Stearns about what hanging out in that place did to him. Ask my friend Dan Merchant. Ask that guy who just got back from two weeks in Haiti. "Helping the poor" doesn't change their world so much as it changes ours.

Like the first week (or month) of Calculus when you want to quit because nothing makes sense, like the 10 minutes (or 30 minutes) of a 5k, this is not a fun time. It does not make it easier that you don't suddenly wake up one day understanding everything. But painful experience by painful experience, choice by choice, you come to a better understanding of the character of God. It never makes complete sense, but as you spend time with people in their difficulty, as you see the grace of God pushing impossibly through the pain, disease, and poverty, you slowly come to a place you've never seen before; a place where God's grace and love and justice is entirely fresh and new. Its a tedious, painful, messy, beautiful path and but there is no other path to that place.

God lays the suffering at our door and says, "Look! This is the reality and, yes, I could have prevented it. Now what are you doing to do about it? Are you going to try to explain away the reality of suffering? Are you doing to close your eyes and stick your fingers in your ears? Maybe throw some money or condolences at it while you slam the door? OR will you get down into the dust and help this guy scrape his sores? Will you let him ooze all over your couch? Will you acknowledge that you and he are the same in my eyes?"

"Will you let me teach you something new about my grace?"

Don't hate the poor because you are afraid. Don't sit in your affluence (or sufficiency!) and pray desperately that God will preserve it. Don't just write your check and try to forget. Open your eyes and your arms and let God teach you something new.

For there will never cease to be poor in the land. Therefore I command you, 'You shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor, in your land.' Deut 15:11

Gift a gift that lasts this Christmas from Compassion International or World Vision but don't stop there. Start a tedious, painful, messy, beautiful journey into God's grace.