beautiful and strong

Dear Haiti,

You are such a beautiful, strong, complicated country.  Your history reads like an ancient tragedy, pain on top of pain:  slavery, sugar, mahogany, wounds opened by the whip, rebellion, armies, Napoleon, sanctions, reparations, hurricanes, racism, dictatorship after dictatorship, private armies, poverty, privatization, terror, hope — and an earthquake that finally opened our eyes.

When the earth trembled, our hearts melted.  We prayed.  We cried.  We sent money. 

Then life happened.  Other stories won our attention, we had to go to work, clean the house, make the lunches for tomorrow.  All the ordinary tasks, the errands and the lists, dulled the hurt.  Not that we forgot, not exactly.  There's just so much to do. 

But here's the thing:  the heart of your country is still in ruins, access to clean water is still virtually non-existent, millions of people still live in tents, and we can still hear your cries mourning the loss of your loved ones — when we quiet our minds and listen.

God of loss and mourning, God of struggle and pain, God of Haiti, melt our hearts once again.  Remind us that there is to be "no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another.  And if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it; if one member is honored, all the members rejoice with it." + 1 Corinthians 12: 25-26

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Thank you to Gregory Bull for melting our hearts with this photo.