On Love and Haiti

I interviewed a chaplain today who just returned from Haiti along with his crew of first responders. He talked of emergency surgeries on sewage-laden ground, limbs with gangrene, amputations without anesthesia. He talked of tent cities where the most privacy a family can get is a few sheets strung up from poles, next to thousands of other families and their sheet shelters.

He was upset. I was getting upset. It was hard to imagine a human body just like mine in such abysmal conditions. From my comfortable, clean office, it was hard to imagine death being so imminent.

The question of suffering became a bit more real to me in that long, slow interview, and during the drive home, where I turned the dial to some comforting pop music that transported me to a shallower, carefree world. Life is suffering, and what we're living now is called the American Dream for a reason -- it's a dream-like state, divorced from the war, pain and calamity most of the world faces every day.

And yet it hardly deserves the name dream, because I think it can be a hell without us knowing it. It can be a hell when we hate it, when we can't find peace and contentment though circumstances are otherwise ideal. It can be a hell when we think we've got things under control and don't need God, or worse, only need him casually.

Perhaps the pearl in the oyster, the blessing in the curse, is that people living amid political, economic and physical chaos can idolize neither this fleeting life or this fallen world. They worship God undrugged by wealth and predictability.

To live is Christ, but to die is profound, perpetual gain.