Sunday, January 24, 2010

Haiti on Our Minds

Last time I took a moment to write down some thoughts on this blog I was fresh off the job of jack hammering the plaster from a pool. It was then I was thinking about the work it might take to clean up a giant earthquake. How many days and volunteers it might take to make sense of the rubble and reconstruct civilization again. Here I am a month later and Haiti is in the middle of a relief and clean up effort I don't think any of us could ever imagine. Daily I pray for God to meet the needs of our Haitian brothers and sisters who are searching for a home, searching for their family, and desiring just one sip of fresh, clean water.

So what do we do as a world? How can we lovingly attend to this small island nation? First thing that comes to mind is to keep these brothers and sisters in our thoughts and prayers. They need our positive thinking and to be included in our dinner table prayers. We can bring up discussions with each other about the social inequalities that remain ever present in our world. The 7.0 quake that hit the poorest nation in the western hemisphere had a much greater affect than the 6.9 earthquake that hit San Francisco two decades ago. Why is this? Haiti does not have the infrastructure nor the building codes nor the resources of that of a wealthy city like San Francisco. There are so many layers to poverty that I have yet to understand, but nothing makes you think about it more than when it presents itself on the front cover of every newspaper in the world.

Living near many Haitians in the Dominincan Republic has opened my eyes to the resilience of these people. They are a strong people because they know how to come together and share whatever they have. I believe poverty can be extinguished by human kinds efforts to share all that they have including Love. Food, bottled water, and medical supplies may be waiting to be distributed on the runway at the airport in Port au Prince, but the supply of Love is never waiting. Love is in infinite abundance if we choose it to be. Our direct loving interactions with people most closely around us can ripple across the world and better the human race.

So I urge everyone to start loving more and think about how they can tap into this infinite supply of love where ever they live on the globe. It can help the people in Haiti.

DIVINE LOVE ALWAYS HAS MET AND ALWAYS WILL MEET EVERY HUMAN NEED. - Mary Baker Eddy

I Love you all,
Jared