Tragedies Are Opportunities For Reflection And Rebirth…

A while back I was asked to deliv­er a short address to a small group of peo­ple includ­ing a few local pub­lic offi­cials. It was around the time that Haiti was dev­as­tat­ed by the ter­ri­ble earth­quake, tak­ing the lives of tens of thou­sands of Haitians in the process.
One of the issues that were cen­ter stage at the time was how best to get resources to the peo­ple who need­ed them the most.
There were many ideas dur­ing the time as to how best to exe­cute get­ting crit­i­cal much-need­ed food, med­i­cine & equip­ment for shel­ter to the suf­fer­ing peo­ple.
I thought about the ideas a lot but the one com­po­nent that seemed to be the prob­lem solver was not men­tioned at all.
It was the four-let­ter word “LOVE”.

Well-inten­tioned peo­ple can give all of the mon­ey, food, and equip­ment need­ed in a time of cri­sis, but as long as there is no love in the heart of those han­dling the efforts, all those resources gen­er­al­ly end up in the wrong hands, and with mon­ey pour­ing from it into the wrong pock­ets.
Those who remem­ber those events may attest to just how bad­ly those resources were han­dled after that earthquake.

God Is Calm Comfort, Crises Offer Opportunities To Demonstrate God’s Love…

Today we are faced with a cri­sis of a dif­fer­ent nature. This time, it is not one coun­try fac­ing a cri­sis while every­one else looks on.
This time it is a cri­sis where all of us are at risk, all of us are vul­ner­a­ble.
There are no those peo­ple over there.
We are all God’s peo­ple fac­ing a cri­sis togeth­er.
Given our instincts to imme­di­ate­ly default to pan­ic, this pan­dem­ic offers an oppor­tu­ni­ty for intro­spec­tion, an oppor­tu­ni­ty for demon­strat­ing love & car­ing toward each oth­er.
This time the vic­tims are not hun­dreds or thou­sands of miles away, they are all around us, we are the vic­tims, we are all at risk.
As trag­ic as the deaths and the hor­ror sto­ries are, they offer us the unique oppor­tu­ni­ty to be of help to our neigh­bors. No deed is too small to mat­ter in times of crisis.

Not all of us will emerge on the oth­er side of this, nev­er­the­less, when this shall have end­ed, there will be books writ­ten about the tremen­dous oppor­tu­ni­ties for the rebirth this pan­dem­ic offered. They will talk about those who took advan­tage of those oppor­tu­ni­ties.
Out of the sul­phuric ash­es and lava spilled from an angry vol­cano, ris­es a beau­ti­ful for­est filled with life and promise.
How we emerge from this event may depend on how we treat each oth­er.
Whether we sur­vive or thrive may depend on whether we pan­ic or we fall back and see the hand of God in every event.