This morning my 3 year old helped me arrange bottles of water and capri sun juice boxes in a cooler as we prepared to celebrate her sister’s 5th birthday ... she was clean, she had dinner last night, she slept in a clean bed and had breakfast this morning. She was wearing clean clothes, a warm jacket, shoes and socks and had a ribbon in her hair.
We not only own a cooler full of clean drinkable water, we will be giving it away without hesitation because there’s more where that came from, much, much more. My 3 year old is just having fun “helping” Daddy, she does not realize the immense weight of the blessings which have laid upon us. I love my daughter in ways that it would take an entire book to describe ... suffice to say she is fantastic and rude and mean and sweet and helpful and free with her thoughts and emotions and every second with her is a wonderful second. I know many parents, and there are plenty that really love their children and love spending time with them. So there we were loading clean potable water, the essence of life itself, into a cooler filled with ice ...
On the outskirts of Mexico City there is a man who is my age and he has a 3 year old daughter and she is having fun helping her Daddy while they root through a landfill looking for enough food to stave off starvation for one more day. It is hot and the air is saturated with the smell of rot, flies crawl in their eyes and ears, the little girl has no shoes and no socks, her hair is unkempt, her skin dirty, she had no dinner last night and no breakfast this morning. When they find water to drink, it is not in bottles ... it is not clear, and it might quench their thirst or it might make them deathly ill ... she has a sister and no one knows when either one of them was born. There is no birthday.
In Port-au-Prince there is a father who is holding his beloved 3 year old in his arms as she succumbs to the fever and the dehydration of cholera in a tent that has been their home for a year, since the earth shook and brought the roof of their house down upon his family, killing his wife and his other children ... the doctor told him he is a few hours away from being completely alone in this world, his last remaining child gone before sunrise.
Yesterday in the Ivory Coast as living father buried his 3 year old daughter, caught in the cross fire, killed by a bullet meant for an AK-47 wielding rebel ... she had been playing in the street in the village while her father tended to the fields ...
And a father in Afghanistan ...
And a father in Somalia ...
And a father in Gaza ...
And a father in El Salvador ...
And a father in Mongolia ...
I don’t know what to do with the guilt I feel for God pouring out such blessings on my neighbors and myself and my family, I am so overwhelmingly grateful, I am completely undeserving. I have done nothing to earn a life of peace and safety and health and abundant food for myself or for my children. Do you think you’ve earned this? Do you think that they have earned that? Does that explain our foreign policy? I pray that God will show us what it is that we are supposed to do with our abundance, I pray that we will do what it is we were intended to do and I pray a deep and sorrowful prayer of thanksgiving that God chose to spare me the life of my peers, that He chose to spare my children and I pray that I will do a satisfactory job teaching them that we have not earned this.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I think this was well-written and touching. The device you used with the ellipses was particularly effective. I am absolutely for taking moments of pause and rediscovering the things that are god in each of our lives and giving back what we can to mend the disparity.
ReplyDeleteThat said, this begged a question from me, and that is:
What have your children done to NOT deserve the things that you have? By asking them to realize that they haven't "earned" the things that you are fortunate enough to provide for them, I fear that you're instilling a feeling of guilt rather than responsibility. Am I making to much of what might be just a slight distinction?