Insanity

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Albert Einstein

What has the Haiti Tragedy been teaching you? At the same time I’ve been living through it all myself, I’ve been remembering another tragedy not too long ago too, i.e. Katrina, and how we all responded when it hit. I’m seeing a lot of similarities, you? Have we learned anything since then? To make systemic change to the world sometimes we need to change up our own system first, i.e. the way we’ve always done things. Some of the questions I have been asking myself include…

Have you been scrambling to respond or was your church organized already? Maybe we need to ready ourselves because with ever increasing frequency, these types of tragedies will not stop? [Just a note: these types of events allow the church to really shine. When the world sees the church step up, they see Christ.]

Are you expecting someone to come along and make it easy, or are you willing to go out of your way and truly sacrifice? [We cannot send the Schwann man to pick up every healthy kit. Could our clusters of churches work together at a higher level and get them to our pick up sites?]

Who else do I need to get involved? [As much as the health kits will bless and provide, they are worthless without contacts in the trucking and transportation system to get them there.]

What is the best way to spend my time, donating my spare change or trying to influence the principalities and powers to stabilize Third World Governments and build much-needed infrastructure and industry? Donating a canned good or leveraging our economic power?

What is the most effective thing I can do the next time I go on a mission’s trip? Hand out some food or find a partner to start a micro-loan program?

What other systems do we uphold unnecessarily that we need to look at much differently? E.g. our church’s disciple-making system, the way we handle indigent requests…what things are we doing that aren’t accomplishing as much as we really think?

As much as we want and feel compelled to do something, let’s make sure we are doing big enough things.