19 June 2015

I went to Haiti last week, and I encountered a world where the air is hot and thick, sticking to your skin and filling your clothes with the constant scent of burning rubber and human filth. Trash littered the streets and animals ran amuck amidst a sea of people who seemed not to even notice that their gutters were overflowing with old bottles and crushed cardboard. And as we watched natives carve two feet for every six inches of ours, I wondered what the point really was.

Here we were, a bunch of fat white Americans, come to do in five days a job that could have provided income for several Haitian families for two or three. Here we were, handing out cheap plastic toys that we would never, in America, pretend were anything significant, and yet we presented them to the Haitian kids as if they were something devastatingly special. It seemed so condescending to me, so pointless. What were we actually coming to accomplish? What could we actually do for Haiti? Nothing. It seems to me that the money might have been better donated to an organization that could actually accomplish something instead of spend a lot of money to feed 17 people American food once a day.

To be fair, the youth leaders said that the point was not to try and save Haiti, but to try and connect with the people and have our own hearts changed. But how can you connect with someone when you don't even speak their language? How can you know and love someone if you do not understand their thoughts, their passions, their dreams, their hopes, their trials? Without some basis for communication, we are just a bunch of white teenagers expecting kids to feel loved because we can mispronounce some of their names and ask how old they are.

As for having my own heart changed? It has changed, but not necessarily in the way that, perhaps, my youth pastor might have wanted. My questions about honesty and loyalty and the lack of it in the Christian church were met with a surprising amount of resistance, an attitude that seemed to suggest that I should blindly trust someone's opinion because they were older than I. My suggestion that perhaps not all teenagers are as hormonal and stupid as we are made out to be was met with a kind rebuttal that once again alienated me from the rest of my age group. My opinions seemed to be treated with a sort of disinterested condescension. As if I were not old enough for them to be considered valid. As if the fact that I had not read all the Bible meant I could not think.

I think a lot of Christians spend so much time worrying about the Truth that they forget to care about individual people's truths. I think that sometimes personal experiences and convictions are pushed aside and ignored in the face of doctrine. I think that Christians tend to forget that we believe many lies about ourselves and, instead of trying to kill those little lies at the root, they try to cover it over with a blanket truth.

I think that sometimes Christians are so concerned with keeping themselves pure and staying away from all appearances of evil that they forget that disloyalty is one of the biggest evils there is. You cannot love someone and abandon them; you cannot claim to love everyone in the world and cut off people who think or act differently than you. You cannot isolate yourself from the world and still claim to care for it.

And yet, I think there is a difference between abandoning someone and stepping away. Sometimes, you reach a point where you can no longer help someone. The difference, I think, lies in the message sent whilst stepping away. I think that you can distance yourself but still remain open to helping that person if they are willing to change. However, I think most people feel shame and inadequacy when they cannot save someone, and to cover over their shortcoming, proceed to treat that person like trash, justifying their damnation with Bible verses about purity and righteousness. You can refuse to join in someone's depravity without severing from them completely.

We're supposed to be the light of the world, so what is the point of us if we never venture into it?