church

Mission Trip Haiti: Business as Usual, Almost — Part 2

Everyone was shocked; I hadn’t even once considered that the epicenter could be Port-au-Prince.

My first reaction was untempered, “Let’s go! People need our help!” However, Bruce kindly and patiently explained our position: a group of white people, with no experience in disaster recovery, who can’t speak French or Creole, and don’t have place to stay, food to eat, or water to drink. Of course, Bruce was right; we would have been more of burden than anything. I guess that’s the kind of insight one gets after working in Haiti for twenty-five years.

Life continued, more or less, as normal. Bruce was working overtime trying to coordinate relief efforts with his organization, CrossWorld, and we did what we could for the people of Port-au-Prince from where we were by praying. The only real impact to us was that our days were a bit shorter since Bruce had so much going on.

DSC_5281
18.0 mm || 1/250 || f/3.5 || ISO200 || NIKON D70
, Nord-Ouest, Haïti


DSC_5290
70.0 mm || 1/320 || f/4.5 || ISO200 || NIKON D70
, Nord-Ouest, Haïti


DSC_5291
38.0 mm || 1/400 || f/4.2 || ISO200 || NIKON D70
, Nord-Ouest, Haïti


Read More »Mission Trip Haiti: Business as Usual, Almost — Part 2

0

Be Back Soon

In case it wasn’t obvious, I’m done with the Fall 2008 semester. Final grades will be posted to Blackboard on Tuesday (I think).

Graduation is tomorrow (Friday) and I’ll be going to that and then some graduation parties. I’m thinking about skiing on Saturday morning and then I head down to Colorado Springs to see a couple of my cousins dance in the Nutcracker.

I’ll pack on Sunday morning, head to church and Old Chicago’s in the evening, and the retire for the night.

I’ll be leaving first thing Monday morning, back in Seattle by Tuesday evening.

0

More on Lent

I have this really cool book I got for graduation called The New International Dictionary of the Christian Church. Lent is traditionally a time of 40 days before Easter spent fasting. When I started giving something up for Lent a few years ago, it was in the spirit of fasting from something particular, soda, caffeine, swearing. Soda was originally suggested by Darren (I think) for our entire Bible Study to give up because we drank quite a bit of Dr Pepper and it was going to be a hard thing to give up. Every year I try to thing of something that I can fast from that would be meaningful.

I felt that giving up soda this year would be too easy and I wanted to find something that would be more of a challenge. I thought about blogging, instant messaging, and reading my news feeds. They would be hard to give up, but they are also critical to what I do and giving them up would be more akin to not journaling, not talking with my friends (i.e. giving them the silent treatment), and not reading the newspaper. I don’t play that many video games, so giving that up wouldn’t be a challenge at all and I’m really not that into Facebook (I might check it every three days or so).

I started to think about other things I could do. Perhaps instead of giving something up, I could do something instead. And so for Lent, I am going to go to church every single Sunday. It’s something that I’ve been trying to do ever since I moved to Golden and I just really slacked on it. It will be hard, but I can do it.

0