don’t panic

The last few weeks have shown me more about humanity and Christianity than many years pervious. The earthquake in Haiti provided a unique view into a side of the church that we don’t get to see very often. It was present during Katrina, and again with the tsunami in Indonesia, and honestly, I can say that it’s a side of the church that makes me want to vomit with rage.

Why, as Christians, do we suddenly feel compelled to help a people during a disaster, that we couldn’t have given a damn about a week earlier?

There’s a literal epidemic of people, well-meaning and completely sincere people, who suddenly feel led by God to go to an island nation which they had nothing at all to do with before that moment, to try and help people that have nothing, literally nothing, save for what they can pull out of the rubble around them.

But why? Why would God wait until now to put these people into your heart? Why would he wait until AFTER they have been devastated to send help? Is it a prerequisite of salvation that we be days from death, or that every last possession in our home, and our home itself, be laid waste? Certainly I can see the theological debates running on that one, but now ask yourself, has God dictated that we are to be destitute? Has He said that you can have no happiness or earthly goods while we wait for his coming?

Why go to Haiti? What will you do there? Are you a doctor? They need doctors. Are you a trained aid worker? Do you know the local language, or are you going to need someone to interpret every last thing, from the dire pleading of a woman to help dig her dead child out of the remains of her house, to the directions to the temporary latrine.

Why go to Haiti? Are you a construction worker? They might need those… in six months. No one is rebuilding anything yet. No one has any money. No one has much of anything.

Why go to Haiti? Are you going to join the crowd of other reporters chronicling the pain and suffering of the destitute? Is it your “mission” to show the world how horrible total destruction is, shoving a camera into the face of a grieving mother or a wide angle shot of the bodies piled by the road? Will you write about God’s awesome love and grace amid the wailing and screaming at night? Will you share stories of hope to those like you, safe back at home, or will you write for the people of Port-au-Prince?

Why go to Haiti? Are you going to minister to the people, tell them about God?… The God that just leveled their entire life and killed most of their friends and family. Will they understand you, or will your alien words and clean clothes simply mock their situation?

Why go to Haiti? Are you planning on helping needy children? Will you offer to watch the crying child of a mother who needs to go stand in line for food and water? What will you do if she doesn’t come back?

Do you think you can offer people hope? Hope of what? That perhaps they can leave their home and come to yours, you rich and prosperous rescuer. Can you offer them safety? Are you better prepared to defend them than the legions of trained and armed military who now walk the streets?

Has God really called you? Has he whispered to you quietly, urging you to go blindly to a nation you have never before seen? Is it sudden? Did He ask you to get round trip tickets, or did he say, “GO THERE. I’ll let you know when you come back, if ever.”

He certainly didn’t use a still, small voice when he flattened Port-au-Prince.

If it’s not God speaking clearly to us to give up EVERYTHING, pack up our tent, and MOVE to Haiti, I have to wonder if it’s God we hear, or someone else. Perhaps even our own guilt, at having so much when so many who had so little are the ones God chooses to bring His wrath down upon.

There were over three million people in Port-au-Prince. There are significantly less now. But, it’s estimated that during any given year there are 3.5 million people homeless right here in the United States; 842,000 in any given week. Most have little or no property. Are they any less deserving of our attention? Is their need any less important than the people of Haiti before or after the quake? Does God care less about them because they happen to live under the bridge near your home? Is their “disaster” any less significant?

There ARE people called to Haiti, by God, or because it’s their job. The people of Port-au-Prince need help to be sure. But so do millions of people right in our backyard. You don’t have to wait for God to destroy a city in order to help people.

Grace:

• elegance and beauty of movement or expression
• seemliness: a sense of propriety and consideration for others
• (Christian theology) the free and unmerited favor or beneficence of God

For most of my life I have had a fascination with grace. Like chapters of a book, it has manifested itself to me in different ways at different times in my life. When I was still in middle school I learned to juggle. I’m not sure what got it started, but I would sit in my room and practice for hours while I listened to music. There was just something magic about the way the balls would complete each complex pattern, dancing seemingly on their own. My hands performed the motions that were too fast and subtle to think about without flubbing a catch. They were able to create a thing of beauty that always surprised me in it’s intricacy and simple impossibility. Objects just never did those things in nature. It was grace; grace of motion and mind that allowed that relaxing rhythm. It was the letting go of conscious control so that the unconscious could create and perform the dance that made me laugh aloud for the sheer joy in celebrating gravity.

As a young adult, I was presented the Christian faith, and shown the spiritual aspects of grace. Unmerited favor. All of God’s work can be summed up in those two words, the power and implications of which can not be fully explored in a hundred lifetimes.

In college, I learned yet another state of grace from readings in philosophy, logic, astronomy, and my own reading for personal enjoyment. I learned about culture, and what it meant to be civilized. For perhaps the first time in my life I really started to look at the world from a much larger perspective. I studied biology and saw the grace of all living things and the complex dance of the various ecosystems that sustain our world. I realized that civilization did not simply apply to humans.

Today, I find that it is that first state of grace that intrigues me the most.  I have accepted my favor with God in faith, and although I am still mystified and continuously surprised by the complexity of our world, I have had to let go of some of my youthful ideals for the reality of mature life. But in everything I do, every motion, there is still that rhythmic dance against gravity. I see it in the way I balance when having to pull myself up off the floor after playing with my daughter, and I feel it in the flip of a pancake on the griddle.

Although I have never spoken of it with my family, I constantly try to find that love of motion in everyday life. There is a flow like water when I rise from the toys on the floor, and an unconscious release as I toss a plastic cup spinning through the air to be caught impossibly just before I fill it with milk for my daughter. Balance and counter balance. Awareness of position and place. The weight and hardness of the world around me.

Recently, my wife has taken to doing studies in mindfulness as a part of her therapy. She is learning to be aware of herself and what she feels… and why she feels it. It’s all very zen, but maybe that’s the point. Grace gives us something that is beyond ourselves. It lends to us a connection to the world that we otherwise have neither the skill nor the merit to acquire. It lets us dance with God, with nature, gravity, and each other. It gifts to us the impossible.

When I was a kid, Christmas was the time when the family got together and shared gifts.  Yeah, yeah… it also had something to do with the birth of Christ, but let’s get real here. When you were five, did you really wake up Christmas morning thinking of our Savior’s birth? No, you hustled out to the pagan bush to check that year’s haul. You were giddy about the ~toys~, wide eyed with excitement and happiness that you would have new things to play with.

As we got older, my sister and I cared a little bit less about the plastic goodies, and started enjoying the time with family more. Christmas had become a time when we did a great big breakfast and sat around and actually talked to friends and relatives we might not have seen in a while. Instead of a lot of little toys, there were usually a few larger ones, and because our interests had changed (carefully shaped and molded by modern-day marketing) the presents were more expensive.

As an adult, Christmas has a completely different meaning and feeling for me. This is obviously to be expected, but I’m actually a bit surprised by what Christmas isn’t. For starters, I have my own wife and child to share gifts with, so it’s not about ME. It’s not about what I get because frankly, I really don’t want anything.

“Impossible,” you scoff. Everyone wants something. Sure. But the things that I want today are no longer molded from plastic or capable of being packaged in a box. Today, I live in a small apartment that is already terribly overcrowded with Stuff, and anything that comes in only makes it more so. Our situation financially is tenuous at best, which means that no matter how you slice it, I am not going to be able to give to my own child the kind of Christmas that I had growing up. That hurts a bit. We all want to give our kids a better life than we had and frankly, looking back on it, my sister and I had it pretty good. We were raised in a middle-income family during a period of minimal world war, in perhaps the most advanced and prosperous country in the world. We never lacked for anything. Today, it’s a little different. Today, the economy is not doing very well, unemployment is high, times are insanely tight, and our prospects for the immediate future are a little bleak. But we’re making it, and that’s something, because a lot of people aren’t.

Sometime in the last decade or so, the whole gift-giving aspect of Christmas has started to seem a little trite. And it’s not just me. Everyone I talk to seems to feel at least a little, that Christmas gifts are more of a chore now than a joy. It stopped being something we looked forward to, and became a task that we needed to do to keep the status quo. We go through the motions of giving almost out of obligation. But for what?… Santa? Christ? The memory of Christmas past?

For my wife, the Christmas season brings with it a whole bunch of really bad memories. She never had the care-free childhood that I did, and for her, a great deal of Christmas is a horrible nightmare that comes with stress and anxiety (beyond the normal frenetic orgy of greed that takes place at malls all over the country). She has to work extremely hard to separate the happy aspects of the season from the bad of her past.

My daughter, on the other hand, is perpetually trapped in the mindset of that excited five year-old. Even though her body is entering into puberty, she lives forever in the self-centered stage of psychological development where everything, and I mean everything, is about her. She is egotistic to the point of cruelty (as any five year-old can be) but backed by the angst (and weight) of a pre-teen adolescent. We have worked hard to try and instill in her the religious aspects of Christmas, and some of it she understands at least at a rudimentary level, but ultimately, it’s the toys. And why not? It was for me when I was mentally five. What right do I have to deny her that?

This year in particular, we really don’t have the financial stability to do the rounds of gifts to our friends and family that we have done in the past. It’s going to be hard enough for my wife and I to have presents appear under the tree for our daughter on Christmas morning, let alone each other. We fall back to gifts of “creativity”, such as pictures and food for family and friends, but even that brings it’s own set of stresses. I look more and more toward just being with my larger family and sharing a tale or two over a cup of apple cider than I do the rest of “it”. I find myself almost repulsed at the overbearing commercials on television for Black Friday sales, and the mere mention of Cyber Monday makes me cringe. The whole idea of “Christmas gifts” has become a negative. Perhaps it’s because people ask me, “What do you want for Christmas?” To which, my honest answer is – A job. Peace for my wife. An end to the medical bills. A future for my daughter. — But no one can realistically give me any of those gifts, and so I am forced to reply with something sickeningly materialistic — “Gift cards are good… Maybe WalMart?” Because I know there will be things I need from there, even if it’s just groceries. Deep down, I really really miss the days when I could have answered truthfully with something as simple as “Battleship”, or “a new bike!”

You can hardly exist on the net these days without a secret combination of letters and numbers that acts as a gatekeeper into your online presence. We all have them.  We have them for our email, our bank, our Netflix account, our doctor, car insurance, cable tv account, phone… and on and on. We have passwords that, in theory, protect our privacy and secure our private information from “those that would seek to abuse us”.

But lately, I have begun to feel a little overwhelmed mentally when it comes to my passwords. Like most people, I have a set of passwords that I use, because having just ONE password is pretty dangerous should that single password be compromised somehow. And some are more “secure” than others, for example the ones I use for my bank, are NOT going to be the same ones that I use to log into World of Warcraft or my Gmail account. But as I age, I find that my memory just isn’t what it used to be. And to make matters worse, more and more of my life is either digital, or literally on the net. I do everything there, whether it’s paying bills, or just staying on top of the latest news headlines, everything requires a login and password. And that wouldn’t be so bad, accept that I have to remember them all, and they are almost all different.

“That’s good!” you say.  ”It’s secure!” Well, yes and no. You see, at some point, your brain (or at least MY brain) just can’t keep that much exact information at the ready.  I have a hard enough time remembering a few phone numbers any more, let alone the login name and password for three dozen different websites.  And to make matters worse, companies, who are increasingly getting sued over breaches in security, are implementing more and more strict rules regarding what exactly you can use as a login name or password. In some cases it’s getting downright ridiculous.

Take Gmail for example. This is my “not so secure” email address. Sure, I want it to be private, but it’s the one I give out to those sites that “require” a valid email address, but aren’t trustworthy enough to get my more private one linked to my private domain. No way. And in the past, I have used one of my generic passwords and it’s been fine.  But suddenly, gmail decided that I wasn’t secure enough and basically made it a requirement that I change my password. My old one was six characters long, which was actually more than some of my passwords which were only five. Google wanted at least eight.

Frak. This is like another whole phone number to remember. But, it’s made with letters, so I can find a way to remember it easier, right… NO, you can’t use anything from a list of known words. Okay… NO, it has to have at least 2 numbers as well. Okay then… NO, you can’t have any running strings of numbers or letters (1234… ABCD). Well how about… NO, it can’t contain any portion of your previous password. “Would you like us to generate one for you?”…. Yes…

Q7g6H3k#D7*21H

Ah, yes.  Much easier to remember.

I exaggerate, but not by much. On most sites, the new “minimum length” is six characters, and most of the rules mentioned above are real. It gets so bad that we start considering writing them down somewhere… which any security guy will tell you in a deep and stern voice that you must NEVER EVER DO. And they would be right of course. But what choice do we have? The rules to make passwords more secure are purposely designed to make them hard to guess. Unfortunately, those same rules make them equally hard to remember. And here’s the thing, having a secure password no more safeguards your personal information than a weak one if your computer is already compromised. Yup, all those viruses you’ve been fighting… Many of them are there to do nothing more than harvest your password, even if it’s, “Q7g6H3k#D7*21H”. And frankly, if someone is seriously out to hack your bank account or hijack your identity, there are far far easier methods than brute-force cracking your password. It’s a lot more likely they would just start by rifling through your trash. Then it’s just a matter of doing a little social engineering to take over your life.

And it’s happened to all of us… you forget one. No matter how hard you try, you just can’t seem to log on to a certain account and you finally relent and hit the “I forgot my password” link. And you go through the process of either an email reset (provided it’s not your email password you have forgotten) or you answer the dreaded “personal question”.  These are those special questions that only you are supposed to know. Things like, “what is your favorite sports team?”… the answer to which is probably plastered all over the back of your car, or known by a mere 50 of your closest friends. I really hate these questions because, for whatever twisted reason, I just don’t hold on to the kind of information that most people do I guess. For example, as one of your question choices, they might have, “What is your favorite rock band?” Would that be now, at this very moment, or two years ago when I set up my account? Or how about, “What was the name of your first pet?” Okay… “Mac” I enter. “Sorry, your answer must be five characters in length or more.”  GAH!! Pet names are short! “Sid, Spot, Rex”, etc… What dunderhead is writing these filters?! And is it any more secure for a potential thief to guess my pet’s name (which could very easily be found in five minutes on Google) than to hack my actual password?

It’s maddening, and frankly only going to get worse as more and more of our lives are done online. Someone needs to seriously come up with a better way of securing our data… like maybe an individualized global number that every person has invisibly tattooed on their right hand or forehead… I’M KIDDING!… kinda…

It seems that part of the problem with arresting illegal immigrants coming up from Mexico is that the Department of Homeland Security has mandated that illegal immigrants charged with minor offenses and without criminal history should be released on recognizance, so they can show up at a court before an immigration judge. And, big surprise, almost none do. Aside from the fact that they (probably rightfully so) fear they are gong to be deported if they show up, many have difficulty even getting to the courthouse, which at times can be hundreds of miles away.

So what do you do? Keeping them in jail is not an option. Our jails are already overcrowded. Simply letting them go isn’t working, and merely dropping them off just inside the Mexican border is like saying, “thank you for playing, care to try again?”

So here’s an idea. If we’re going to spend the money to process them anyway, why not put them on a nice boat and ship them someplace else in Mexico… like maybe Salina Cruz, which is all the way down by Guatemala. This way, there will at least be a delay in them coming back into the U.S., and they might be a little more hesitant to make the jump if they know getting caught means a lengthy and possibly expensive trip up from the South.