Skip to main content

Haiti 2012: June 8

There is a sense of accomplishment and lightheartedness as we ended our final day here at the orphanage. Our perspectives shifted often from outward to inward: a focus on each other and inside ourselves. I personally expected my work ethic to be tested, believing we would be working consistently and hard. While we did work hard at times, though, it was not burdensome. In fact, we took joy in our work together because-- I think-- we worked together. We shared the burden and the satisfaction of our work, the labor and the glory from it. This sense was, for me, just one example of the larger lesson I believe God continues to teach me, both here and at home: that despite our common tendencies to put off and be put off by others, despite our sensitivities and our judgments, our disparate temperaments and differences in social awareness, we are meant for each other. Slight and deep conflicts alike were all overshadowed by the common goal and common faith we shared while here, a reminder that God can redeem our brokenness and heal us, then use his people to care for the orphan and widow.

This current of thought I'm reminded of helps me see yet another, equally important truth: God pursues us. He is after us for our good. He wants us to know him for his glory and our peace, and embracing his commands rather than rebelling against them leads us there. I think the greatest lesson I learned while here is that our God is the same God in Haiti as in Stockton. He seeks our good, writing for us one more page of the story that is our lives when we hear and follow, and no person and no circumstance can change the author. Torn and shredded as these pages may be, God makes it the more decisively his when we truly offer it to him. This is true for people like me, for churches like ours, and for countries like this.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Persuasion

At different points in history, governments have devoted men, women, and resources to try to persuade others to their side. One significant example of this occurred in Germany under Adolf Hitler. Hitler knew how important it was to make sure the German people were on his side as leader of the country. One way he did this was by controlling what people heard. Specifically, near the beginning of World War II, Hitler made it a crime for anyone in Germany to listen to foreign radio broadcasts. These were called the “extraordinary radio measures.” He did this to ensure that Germans weren’t being persuaded by enemy countries to question their loyalty to Hitler. He knew that a German listening to a radio broadcast from Britain might persuade that German to believe that Great Britain was the good guy and Hitler the bad guy. This was so important, in fact, that two people in Germany were actually executed because they had either listened to or planned to listen to a foreign radio broadcast (one...
Post a Comment
Read more

Comparison

Psychologists and others have studied ways in which we compare ourselves to each other. One man named Leon Festinger argued that we tend to compare ourselves to other people when we don’t know how good or bad we are at something (like football or playing the guitar). One way we do this is when we compare ourselves to those who are not as good as we are, to protect our self-esteem (called “downward social comparison;” example: we’re playing basketball and miss most of our shots, but we feel okay because a teammate wasn’t even given the ball). Another comparison we make is when we compare ourselves to others who are doing much better than we are (called “upward social comparison”). When we see others who appear to be doing better than we are, we can respond by trying to improve ourselves, or by trying to protect ourselves by telling ourselves it’s not that important. There was a study published in 1953 by Solomon Asch, who asked students to take part in a “vision test.” The par...
Post a Comment
Read more

Thoughts on Academic Purpose

If I could tell my students how to choose a path of employment, I would emphasize that no effective writer, historian, athlete, musician, or scientist became such without dedicating themselves to some goal. For that to have taken place, however, the respective expert must have had a firm idea about why they were doing what they were doing. In other words, they must have had purpose. Karl Marx spent countless hours in English libraries, I would share, to understand the functioning of society in order to improve it; while Isaac Newton often went without food to gain a firmer grasp of the science of motion, and eventually revised that science. They did this because they had a clear purpose, a real reason for doing what they were doing that would affect others around them. I would communicate that whatever passion students tap into, it should be embarked upon with that kind of clear goal in mind. While they may not know which passions they have yet, I would emphasize that school is a time ...
Post a Comment
Read more