the Reconciler

This whole cross-cultural thing is just not easy.


Life can be so hard in Haiti, so we also get thinking that life in the States would be easier.  And it is just NOT.  And we're even on vacation, and there's BBQ, and bathtubs...nice roads, ice cream. 

Making sense of it all is not easy.  In our home community in Haiti, we are the richest people we know.  I have good friends who live meal by meal, never owning a grain of rice or an egg more than the very next meal. We are THE only people in Saccanville who have internet.  The only ones!  In thousands of people!  The only ones who have a vehicle.  A camera.  A refrigerator.  A toilet.  Warm water.  Running water.

Suddenly, we're in Ft. Lauderdale.  We go to the mall to try to find an Apple store for my broken computer.  There are 18,000 people at the Apple store, all with iPhones, iPads, iPods and iMega-Ginormo stuff and I got so dizzy I had to leave.  The marble mall is swarming with fake-hair stands and 50 dollar wind-chimes and 600 dollar copper cooking pots and...tons of running water, even just for fountains.


My best Haiti clothes suddenly felt faded and ill-fitting, and we don't own a cell phone, and the lunch place features heaping buckets of fresh foods, and I felt like I stuck out like a sore thumb...far more than I have felt for a long time in Haiti.


I kept weirdly trying to find someone I recognized or someone I knew, holding Lily's hand as we stood, unsure of what to do, how to speak, how to be.


How do you reconcile it all?  How do you put it all together?


How can I know how to find my way to a directory, read it, and follow the escalators to an Apple store where everyone is zipping their fingers across screens and tapping, tapping... AND how to find the tiny dirt path through the bushes to Konpech where everyone is braiding hair, playing soccer with a flat basketball, chopping through ginormous trees with machetes, sitting, sitting.

More than that, how can it all exist together?  How can Coach bags and iPhones and Bentleys exist in the same world as families who have no grip on the next meal?   How can one of my/HIS countries scrape huge amounts of heaping food into the garbage at the food court while another gets put out of the life-saving hospital bed because they can't pay the $2.50 to stay, dying in the street outside?


How do you reconcile it all, and how do you look past it to realize that all the real needs are the same?  That the true need is the same?  How do you keep from getting caught up by all the finery AND keep from getting caught up by the lackthereof, and remember the ONE thing that's needed...the One thing that is above culture...the One in whom all things are reconciled?


I can honestly share that in the midst of the bedazzled, iPhoned, self-sufficient mall-crowd we felt the same urgent and deep need of Him that I felt just a few days ago in the midst of a panicked, violent penniless city-crowd.


Further goes the argument of blooming where He plants you.  There is no greater mission field than where He puts you, family.  The trappings may look different, but the need is all the same.


I've said a million times that He is the Only Answer.  I believe it more now than ever.  But there are a lot of questions about how it all works, aren't there.


Trusting them (not seeing, not understanding, but by faith) to the Reconciler.