Imagine for a moment that it’s a warm, Saturday afternoon in the middle of summer.
You’ve mowed the lawn and are sitting inside having lunch and some refreshing lemonade with your family.
Suddenly, everything begins to shake violently, cracks start appearing in the walls, bits of plaster are falling all around you and things are crashing to the floor from shelves all around. The kids are screaming and you jump up and drag them outside as quickly as possible.
Moments later, the house crashes down behind you, leaving a pile of sticks and rubble looking something like this:
You look down the street and see total devastation:
You realize you left your wallet, phone and everything else inside the house – including your car keys, which wouldn’t matter anyway because your car looks a little like this:
You hear a baby crying underneath the rubble of one of the houses down the street and run over to help. The house is almost completely destroyed except for a couple of walls in one corner which just happens to be the baby’s room. as you start to pick your way across the rubble to the room, you see the mangled and bloodied bodies of the baby’s parents lying lifeless under the boards you’re standing on.
Reaching the baby, you life her from her crib which was miraculously untouched by the devastation.
What do you do now? Seriously, what would you do?
You left your wallet inside the house, if you try to go to the bank, that won’t help because it looks like this:
You have no money, no transport, no food, no water, nowhere to shelter, no clean clothes, no diapers for the baby, no sanitary supplies, NOTHING.
What would you do?
Where would you even go to the bathroom?
Think about it for a moment. what would you do? How would you feed your family? How would you even give your kids a drink when they were thirsty?
You might find a little money in your pockets but even if you can get to the store, it probably looks like this:
Then there’s the immediate problems to deal with. You can hear screams and cries for help coming from the collapsed buildings all around you. How do you get people out? More importantly, what do you do for those you can’t get out right away? How do you comfort them? How do you stop the screams?
What about your friends and other family? Are they safe? Did the building they were in survive? How do you find out with no phone and no car?
Do you sit and wait for the authorities to help? Are they even coming? If so, When will they get to you?
Think about it. What would you DO?
This is the situation that hundreds of thousands of people around the world are suddenly faced with every year as natural disasters strike around the globe. It’s the situation faced by those affected by hurricane Katrina, it was the situation faced by people in Indonesia after the tsunami hit and it’s the situation faced by the survivors of the earthquake in Haiti.
Put yourself in their position for a moment. What would you have done that first day? How would you have survived and kept your family alive? How would you have coped with the cries from your children as their hungry bodies begged them for food and water?
Would you have been there alongside the people looting stores, desperate for food and supplies after not eating for days?
How about now, weeks after the event when there seems to be no hope for recovery?
Thousands are still living in tents, totally dependent on handouts for food and water. There’s little or no prospect for jobs. No way to produce their own food, no security at night, no privacy, no heating or air conditioning – and a rainy season on its way.
Put yourselves in their situation today – and then consider what you have done and are doing to help.
Luke 6:31 Do to others as you would have them do to you.
When a disaster of that magnitude happens, I suppose you begin to understand the difference between need and want.
We want for much in this country, and we often confuse that want for need.
We all have such a warped view of what 'need' is.
Great post, Peter.
Thanks, Ginny
I still can't wrap my mind around the devastation. I have so much respect for those who have organized missions to help those in need. It would be so hard to even know where to start.From where I sit, I pray and give as much as I'm able. It is the very least I can do – I have much more than I'll ever need and I'm sure God didn't give it to me to keep and hoard.
You got it, Candy.
Some are called to go, some are called to resource those who go.
We just have to use what we've been given for what we've been called to!
I don't believe it is the case that there is "no hope for recovery". Were there no such hope, Haitians would not be singing their love of God to God. They would not, one day after the quake, be back at work at One World Apparel, a garment factory profiled in a story in this morning's paper. They would not be saying, as did a former Haitian doctor who once worked Haiti's slums, that the earthquake "is today — an opportunity, a huge opportunity." Imagine hearing that when you've lost your loved ones.
Haitians do need help, now more than ever. Their stories already are being relegated to pages inside our newspapers, if published at all. They do need our empathy. They need our technological assistance and so much more.
Carnival normally would be in full swing in Haiti now. What's replaced it is mourning. There are so many tears. And the tears fall no matter the station in life; everyone is experiencing deprivation. Unless we ourselves have experienced loss of this kind, we cannot put ourselves in Haitians' place. We can do as you urge, though. We can remember and we can offer what money or other aid we can.
Haitians need our hope to help sustain their own. And in Lenten season, we should make hope manifest.
I purposefully said that it 'seems' there is no hope for recovery.
Sitting here, we can see what's going on and how much hope there is for Haiti but I imagine (and I can only imagine) that for many people who are living in one of the tent cities, a sense of hopelessness must be setting in.
Not for all by any means, many will still retain positivity and optimism but many thousands, I'm sure are wallowing in despair!
very sobering questions …
They are. I sit and wonder what I would do. I hear my children begging for food a few hours after they last ate and wonder what I would do if we lost everything.
Very challenging thoughts here Peter! I am going to have to let this sink for a while …
Interesting post Peter. It is hard to fathom what that's actually like. You see the pictures, but I'm sure that doesn't do it close to justice. I could certainly pray for those people more. it seems the more the news cycles, the less we hear, and the more we forget.
November 5, 1991. I was in sixth grade when a flash flood hit my home town- Ormoc City, Philippines. More than EIGHT THOUSAND people died in a matter of minutes. The days that followed the disaster were the hardest. The city looked like a ghost town, dead bodies were everywhere, the smell was unbearable, no food, no clean clothes, no houses to go home to, nothing. For outsiders, it would seem like the city was beyond repair.
One of my pastor friends had a riveting testimony of standing on the top of their house while it was being swept to the sea. He remembered falling to the water, holding on to a piece of wood in his desperate attempt for survival, passing out, and waking up in the shore naked, wounded and almost dying. He was just a young boy when it happened, probably twelve or thirteen.
Today, nineteen years later, the city is bustling with life again. First time visitors would never notice that more than a decade ago, the place was deemed hopeless and beyond recovery.
I’m not sure how I missed this post, but very needed questions. We have to keep things in perspective. Thanks, Peter.