Haiti’s Heroes

“Never stop being courageous.”

These were the last words I wrote to my sponsored child, Anne-Cherley Amilcar, in a letter I composed after hearing about the earthquake in Haiti. Anne-Cherely is Haitian and although she lives nearly 30 miles north of Port-au-Prince, we continue to wait with bated breath for word of her safety. The entire country, already in peril from abject poverty, has been hurled even further into a miserable horror that threatens every human being within its boundaries. Though all are vulnerable to great suffering, the greatest vulnerability belongs to the Haitian children. Prior to the earthquake, the number of orphaned children in Haiti was estimated at nearly 450,000. It is unconscionable to even try to comtemplate an increase in such a number, but the post-quake increase is certain.

Fortunately, there are heroic organizations, such as Compassion International, who have been attempting to assist the needs of Haiti’s impoverished children over the course of many years and have done so with much success. It was through C.I. that we found our Anne-Cherley and it is through them that we will continue to offer our support. They are going to need it. There will be childhood development centers that will need to be rebuilt and sadly, staff and volunteer positions that will need to be refilled. For those who are longing to offer some kind of support to Haiti, this is definitely a trustworthy and nobel organization to consider.

Of equal standing as a highly effective and reputable outreach to Haitian orphans is a non-profit called Danita’s Children. The organization began over ten years ago when Danita Estrella spontaneously traveled to Haiti with nothing more than a strong sense that she was supposed to go there to offer help. She had no idea how to implement her desire but she knew she was purposed to go. After a year of wandering from volunteer position to volunteer position, she was still unsettled. There was a haunting sense that she was not walking out the level of service that was rooted in her heart.

But the ambiguity of her journey vanished on a day emblazened in her memory forever.

As the story goes, she was sitting at a café table eating her food when she suddenly felt the imploring stare of an underfed boy fall upon her. She looked over and lifted her hand to signal that she saw his need and wanted him to wait for her. Her intent was to order him food and then take it to him, however, there was a man who saw this interchange and became enraged at the boy. He took a whip and began to strike the child. Danita, busy ordering the food, heard his screams and instincively shot up from the table and ran to the child’s rescue. She grabbed the brutal man by his collar and shook him with all her might and then ran to the boy, picked him up, comforted him and bought him food to eat. It was then that she knew her purpose. She decided right then and there that she would open an orphanage for abandoned children.

What began with a small plate of food for a hungry frightened child has developed into three homes that house 75 orphans, a school that provides education to nearly 600 children and a meal program that feeds 17,000 each month. As glorious as all that is, Danita has refused to rest. Right now, her organization is in the midst of building their very first children’s medical center. It is without a doubt that when that mission is completed, Danita will continue to create even more paths of provision for Haiti’s children.

Danita is my hero and it is because of people like her, those who have committed themselves to serving the needs of Haiti’s most vulnerable regardless of personal cost, it is because of such people that I was able to write words of strength to Anne-Cherley. Heroes have great courage and I pray for our little girl to hold onto hers.

The courageous will find each other.

Because I Said So

How many times have these words been uttered by a parent to a child?

Before I was a parent myself, I vowed never to dismiss any question and to explain carefully and thoroughly everything I expected my children to do. I promised I would never resort to the famous “because I said so” that was the answer I received so many times as a child when I questioned “why?”

I did not want to be the parent who would not acknowledge my child. One day, after explaining something to my child several times with the repeated reply, “But why”, I declared with absolute exasperation, “Because I said so.” My daughter looked at me, with complete trust and understanding and said, “Oh, okay.”

I do not even remember what that question was or why I just stopped trying to explain, but I remember that moment of clarity. Children do not need adult explanations for everything that happens. Children need to trust their parents and understand reason is not always theirs to know. That illuminating moment as a parent has stood out to me not only as a parenting issue, but also as a Christian. It is the core of my faith for the most difficult questions I have.

When religious leaders such as Pat Robertson attempt to explain the earthquake disaster in Haiti as part of a pact with Satan, he insults all of Christianity. The self-importance he spews to attempt to explain natural disasters in the framework of God’s will is horrifying. Like a know it all, petulant brat with all the answers, he forgets the words of Jesus, “Truly I say to you, Whoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein.” (Mark 10:15).

By attempting to mystify the laws of nature under the umbrella of God’s will, Robertson denies what we know about physics and arrogantly assumes that man controls nature via actions rather than accept nature and man as side by side pieces of creation. Earthquakes happen on a daily basis as tectonic plates shift beneath the oceans. In the past 30 days, there have been 388 earthquakes worldwide over a magnitude of four. Does God only control the ones that result in human loss?

The indicator of true faith is the ability to accept that which cannot be explained or proven. Throughout the New Testament, Jesus calls us to be children of God. As 1 John 3:1 reminds us, “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.”

I accept humbly that I will not understand everything and in many ways, it is truly liberating. To believe that, yes, there is an answer, but just one I do not need to know, at least not today, eases my mind. It affords me the freedom to focus on that which I do understand and embrace. I am to love my neighbor.

To walk in humility with trust is not an easy walk. I have questions daily and when I see what I perceive as unfair or unjust, I wonder “Why, why, why?” However, like my own child, just a few years ago, when God says, “Because I said so”, I find comfort, not frustration, in my faith.

Why Do Bad Things Happen?

Today’s post is an offshoot of a lively discussion from our Facebook page. It began with some deep questions about the nature of God.

Why does God make tornados, tsunamis, Hitlers, and Bin Laden’s ?
Why do the good die young ?
Why do I have more than I need while other, far better folks have so little ?

I invited my friend, George Crumpler, to weigh in. George is the author of  David: The Untold Story, a historical account of King David. He is a retired high school social studies teacher living in a small town in rural North Carolina.

****

For most of man’s some 100,000 years of existence, we were polytheistic. It is with the Patriarch Abraham that the concept of one True God begins to develop, the character and nature of this God changes over time through the course of the bible. Abraham shares a meal with this God and this God also commands Abraham to sacrifice his only son to appease him, a ritual left over from paganism. This ritual of human sacrifice will be repeated with the birth of Christianity and the death of Jesus on the cross.

The Mayans, a people who practiced blood letting and human sacrifice rejected the missionaries concepts of monotheism but readily accepted the death of Jesus on the cross as a spiritual act. This concept of sacrifice is at the core of the, Hebrew, Christian and Muslim religions to the point of sacrificing their lives in war to defend their religion and also killing others to protect their religion because in doing so they believe they are carrying out the will of God.

Thus, the three great religions of the world have not broken completely from their pagan polytheistic origins of sacrifice and God/Gods micro managing the affairs of man and nature from wars to a gentle rain in the summertime.

Many Christian have difficulty, to the point of being obstinate, reconciling matters of their faith and science. If the Roman Catholic Church had had their way about it, we would all still think the earth is flat because they would put to death anyone who said it wasn’t. Even to this day, most Christians cannot, will not accept the seven-day creation story and the Garden of Eden as metaphor, when various disciplines of sciences from geology to nuclear physics prove that it is a process that has taken billions of years.

Just as the concept of multiple gods responsible for everything from the weather to fertility faded into the category of myth it is time to abandon the false belief of a God sitting on a throne directing the affairs of man down the road to Armageddon and a final day of judgment—this God invented by the Hebrews and adopted by the Christians and Muslims.

What we have is not a self-actualizing, knowing, understanding of God but rather a concept of what God is, forced upon people to the extent that their very life depends upon it both their physical and spiritual (Hell) existence.

Man reasoned correctly that he sprang forth from the earth because he observed that the earth is the producer of all life but where did the earth come from. He gazed upon the sun, moon, and stars and made them the source of creation.

We thus began four thousand years of refining our concept of where we came from and most importantly, why we are here. Maybe we are indeed God’s chosen species.

Jesus said, “…The kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation, nor will people say, ‘Here it is,’ or ‘There it is,’ because the kingdom of God is within you.” (Luke 17:20-21)

Kim said, “We are given everything and we can choose our reality.”

There is a thinking stuff from which all things are made, and which, in its original state, permeates, penetrates, and fills the interspaces of the universe.

A thought, in this substance, produces the thing that is imaged by the thought.

Man can form things in this thought, and, by impressing his thought upon formless substance, can cause the thing he thinks about to be created.

In order to do this, man must pass from the competitive to the creative mind; otherwise, he cannot be in harmony with the Formless Intelligence, which is always creative and never competitive in spirit.

Man may come into full harmony with the Formless Substance by entertaining a lively and sincere gratitude for the blessings it bestows upon him. Gratitude unifies the mind of man with the intelligence of Substance, that man’s thoughts are received by the Formless. Man can remain upon the creative plane only by uniting himself with the Formless Intelligence through a deep and continuous feeling of gratitude. (Wallace Wattles)

“Seek and ye shall find, ask and it will be given…” Jesus.

And he is One who subsists as a cause and source of Being, and an immaterial material and an innumerable number and a formless form and a shapeless shape and a powerlessness and a power and an insubstantial substance and a motionless motion and an inactive activity. (Gnostic Text Allogenes)

Natural disasters, earthquakes, floods, droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes are just that—natural disasters, the forces of nature are indifferent, remember it rains on the just and unjust alike.

Wars, famine, pestilence, murder, rape, child abuse, greed, envy, et al. are the products of culture we create that stuff.

The Creative Stuff, the Source of Being, cannot, will not participate in that but the message is sent for us to love one another, nurture one another, rejoice in others good fortune, console them in their sorrow, care for the widow, orphan and the old—It is up to us to do that. We sit in judgment of our rights and wrongs.

There is a wonder source of love and energy and excitement and joy and creativity and we can tap into that Source, in fact the Source longs for us to do so but will not be disturbed if we don’t.

God may very well be sitting on a throne surrounded by a host of angels but the Creative Source of the Universe is more than likely a happy little Quark.

Many thanks, George, for sharing your thoughts. Amen and amen.