Today I am overwhelmed.  My wife is overwhelmed. And though I haven’t spoken with her, I’ve heard that my sister (AKA our Haitian school teacher) is overwhelmed.  I don’t think the kids are overwhelmed, but they have no idea.  Our dog is smart.  He probably gets it, and will be subsequently overwhelmed.

I was thinking in the car on my way to work this morning how much “easier” life would be if we could just move on with our comfortable and very American way of life.  The thing is, at least for the Webers, I’m pretty certain that isn’t the right decision for us to make.  Why?  Take a moment and read this excerpt from Pastor Bryan Hurlbutt’s journal.  He wrote this after an afternoon spent at Saint Michels hospital in Jacmel.

“Friday March 11th, 2011 – Jacmel, Haiti

Visited a hospital.  It is difficult to mentally process what I saw. I prayed over several for healing, asking them about themselves through a translator. Why they were here, what their names were and such.  Being rather “pastoral.”  However, it became very personal upon seeing a small malnourished child.  The mother, two older children and baby were at the hospital.  They live two hours away and found out after coming to the hospital that they would be there for three months.  Some white doctors had paid for medication for the baby, but now they have no more for medication and they need food and transportation for two of them to go home.  They are stranded, hungry, sick and impotent.  People wept and had to leave the pediatrics bay.  I worked with Georgette, and she communicated with them, and we decided to give one hundred dollars toward transportation, medicine and food, but it feels like drops of water in a desert.  The brokenness is so real, so rabid, so engulfing.  But today was my anecdote.  That baby isolated the pain and strain of a battered people for me.  I touched him.  I talked to them.  They were real.  No sea of people, no ocean of humanity.  It was a bloated, beautiful, spindly-legged baby crafted in God’s image.  What am I to do with all of this?”

These people are real.  They exist, every bit as much as you and I, and God values them every bit as much as he values you and I.  Their lives are just as meaningful.  And they have emotions, hopes, dreams and souls.  Yet, they are starving and suffering, and very few individuals from our privileged society are there to help.  Walking through the hospital grounds I found myself wondering “Who is going to help these people?”  At that moment, is when I began feeling overwhelmed.  Why?  Because I knew the answer.

Typically, I try and write in a way that is funny and sarcastic.  This is supposed to be entertaining, right?  I’m not a very emotional guy, and I never envisioned myself choking back tears putting together a post.  Enough said, I guess.  Time to get back to mortgages…