Last week I got to travel to Haiti with a group of 12 other
Feed My Starving Children staff and supporters.
We spent the week with one of FMSC’s partner organizations, Love A
Child, and saw the many ways God is working through Feed My Starving Children
food.
I hadn’t even been in Haiti a full day and I was already
trying to figure out what I was going to tell people about my trip when I
returned home. It’s always difficult
trying to summarize a trip like this in a succinct way that will convey the
significance of the trip. I’ve been home
a week and I still haven’t really figured out what to tell people about my trip.
The trouble is the message I want to convey about my trip
isn’t a cohesive message.
I want to tell people how wonderful it was to see so many
kids and families who are doing so much better because they have received
nutritious food and other help through Love A Child. Kids are now able to be kids because they
don’t have to worry about where their next meal is coming from. To see kids laughing and running with joy was
beautiful.
But I also need to tell people about the heartbreaking
situations most of us would rather not hear about. We saw far too many children and families who
are malnourished and desperate for food and other resources. There was the mom who brought her two year
old to the malnutrition clinic- the little boy could barely stand and weighed only
17 pounds and I don’t have much hope that his two younger siblings at home were
better off. The nuns who must decide if
they can continue to risk their own lives and their physical safety in order to
care for orphans and others in great need.
The isolated villages that have yet to be reached with the clean water,
medical care, and food they so desperately need.
There is the tension between hope and despair. The message I want share about my trip is
somewhere in the tension between celebrating the truly incredible ways that God
is transforming lives in Haiti and lamenting the hold that evil and death still
have in Haiti.
But this is a tension we live in everyday. It’s just not always as evident as it is in
Haiti.
We live all the time in the tension between good and evil,
the tension between life and death. No
day, no person, no situation is completely good or bad. Nearly everything is somewhere in between and
knowing what to do with this “in-between-ness” is challenging to say the least.
Today is Holy Saturday (or Awkward Saturday as I like to think of it)- the day in between Good Friday and Easter. On Good Friday we remember the most horrific
death of Jesus. On Easter we celebrate
with incredible joy Jesus’ triumphant victory over death. And on Holy Saturday we have to wait in the
tension between death and life.
On that first Holy Saturday, most of Jesus’ followers had
lost all hope. In despair they hid out
in fear because they thought it was all over.
But a few of Jesus’ followers kept their eyes open for signs of new
life. They waited trusting that even in
this unbearably horrible situation God was working. And God sure was at work.
We must recognize the brokenness of the world we live
in. Just like Jesus’ suffering and death
on the cross were real, the suffering and death in Haiti and so many places
around the world are real. While we
often find it so difficult to see beyond the suffering and death, we cannot let
them cloud our vision forever.
Just like life was imminent on that first Easter morning,
new life is at hand if we look carefully for it in our world.
Hope is looking actively looking for glimpses of new life. There is still hope, especially in Haiti.
