[ See my other recent posts about my trip to Haiti ]

I’m struggling on so many different levels. It’s hard to know where to even start with all the tension I feel about myself, the American church, and the state of spirituality among Christians here. I’m doing my best not to look down on American believers and the church with any sort of arrogance because, honestly, the attitude of my heart is really just brokenness for what I see. Jeremy Zach and I talked about this on a little walk we took before leaving the Dominican Republic: until I can share with more grace, my response right now is to keep my deepest thoughts to myself to avoid becoming overly-critical in a way that shuts down communication.

A couple times before we left Haiti, I actually thought, from a spiritual standpoint, that it would be cool to never return to America and just stay with the Haitians, except I knew that would definitely be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There’s a lot to be thankful here in America and a lot that is very positive — there’s no doubt that God has blessed us extravagantly and that our response of materialism and consumerism have affected us in ways I never even noticed until I was removed from it for a brief time. Maybe these things are so glaring to me now because I’m still hyper-sensitive having just come off the trip a couple days ago, but I know my heart for my own American people will never be the same as a result of my experiences in Haiti. We are so blessed, yet so poor.

America and Haiti are complete opposites right now. Haiti has such an overwhelming need for basic necessities and we have such an overwhelming need for revival. I want to be used by God to be a catalyst for revival here, but that task seems exponentially more daunting than the physical tasks that lie before Haiti right now. Cleaning up a collapsed city and providing life-sustaining supplies to hundreds of thousands of homeless people sounds much easier.

So, for now, I’m still processing, thinking, and praying with an intensity unlike I’ve never known before.

If you’re even slightly thinking about going to Haiti sometime soon to serve, you must go now! All your excuses are completely invalid: it’s very safe, you can absolutely afford it, you have the time, and you can make a big difference.

Do it. Now. Stop over-thinking it. Get off your butt and go. Seriously. Go.

Posted on February 22, 2010