What Do You Do When Your Heart Is Tugging

In July of this year, I spent a week in Haiti with Mission of Hope. Below, you'll find a 3 minute sample of some small town traffic. If you'd rather not sit through it all, at least skip ahead and watch from 2:50 forward to hear some rather vigorous honking. (Yes, that's my mug you see in the last half-second of the video):


Earlier this week I was led by one of those mysteriously captivating internet rabbit trails to a story about the mass graves that were dug after the January 2010 Port-au-Prince earthquake. I was sort of jolted to reality when I discovered that just a few hundred yards into the hills where we had been driving were a number of large burial pits where bulldozers had crudely shoved thousands of earthquake victims to their resting place. The pictures were brutal, and I don't recommend looking them up.

What really impacted me, though, was the sharp reminder of how fresh that catastrophe must still be in the minds of countless Haitians. In all likelihood, some of the people I met there this summer have relatives and friends buried up in those hills. And now I feel mildly foolish for not fully comprehending the nearness of the tragedy while I was there, which is not to say I didn't feel anything. I saw the crumbled buildings and the amputees, but I didn't feel it deeply enough.

But where the devastation of sin is greatest, the light of the Gospel shines the brightest and I can report that God's Church is thriving and growing there. My heart wants to somehow be a part of that, but I'm not sure how. If nothing else, I will at least pray.