After many months of waiting for our shipping container to arrive we received word that a truck carrying our beloved cargo had left Port au Prince and would be arriving Wednesday morning.
I remembered back to the stressful feelings of packing to move to Haiti. It happened in two shifts, first to gather items we wanted to ship down to Haiti and after that was done, the remaining items for storage and/or giveaway. I brought load after load to the thrift store, had a huge garage sale, gave away items to friends and family, and finally pared down to what could fit in the boxes for Haiti and what could fit in a storage trailer to leave sitting until we return stateside. What seemed like such difficult choices then, such as whether to pack the food processor or blender, feels a bit ridiculous now.
I remember the feeling of mental exhaustion as I itemized every item for each numbered box, 40 in all. Forty boxes of important things to make it tolerable to live in Haiti for 2 years, or so I thought.
The first few weeks of living here "the container" came up quite a bit. Someone would say something like, I wish I had a ruler, or bread maker, or soup ladle and Erin or I would undoubtedly say, "Oh we have one of those on the container". "The container" could very well have been filled with milk and honey for how I glorified it's contents in my mind. When the container comes I will have __________- fill in the blank with any treasures you can imagine!
But at the same time, other thoughts about the "stuff" were turning in my mind. Within a couple of days of being here we had moved into our 600 square foot apartment and despite the tight quarters I began to realize how very blessed we were compared to so many around us. Even though we had no couch or hot water and our home and school was happening on the end of the multi-leveled twin beds Kirk and I claimed as our sleeping space, we were safe and clean, well fed and disease free, comfortable and entertained in our little space -- far better than our best paid employees.
The woman we hire to wash our clothes (by hand) lives in small, paper thin (literally) shack with a patchwork tin roof and cardboard and newspaper filling the cracks in the sides of her stick walls. Even when days of rain brought over a foot of water to her home and left her dirt floor pocked with mud, Ternicielle came in to work, to wash my sweaty clothes so I could neatly hang them back in tidy rows of skirts and coordinating tops. Her children went to stay with family when the waters began to soak the bottom of their mattresses, while mine slept in bug-free comfort aside mechanical breezes, atop the crisp white sheets she had blued, and then bleached, on the roof with the hot Haitian sun.
I saw her home a couple of days after the rain had subsided. The boys came with me. Her living conditions deeply troubled Noah. At first he was glib and made comments about her "cute little house" and how much fun it would be to camp there like in a fort, but later that night he lay in bed with questions of a just God. How could one person have so much another so little? What is the cause of poverty? It has been a good place from which to talk about what God wants of us as believers and fellow image-bearers, what the true cost of our comfortable wealth is, how to be grateful for what we have without always wanting more, and how to bless others who have so much less.
A lot has happened in our lives to change my perspective on "need" since I packed those forty boxes, so when the container arrived I felt less joy than I had hoped I would in that moment. While I was deeply grateful to have my comfortable king size bed and to unpack linens that smelled of home, I also felt a sense of embarrassment as the 4 young men loaded box after box, all 40 of them, into my small space. How foolish it must have seemed to them. It did to me. Sure, there are some things that are useful and good. I regret neither the boxes of toiletries with 2 years worth of deodorant nor the shelves of books to grow the minds of my kids, but I do regret the excess with which I packed. I regret even more that I allowed myself to believe the mis-truth that my "paring down" for missions was of some marvelous sacrifice on my part.
My boxes stack around me in burden, like a wall of shame. They show me how gluttonous I had become in my consumption of all things sparkly, shiny, and new. I had laid prostrate before the American god of consumerism, even when in my self-righteousness I tried to think otherwise. I tried to justify my consumption by "saving" money at garage sales and thrift stores. Though my budget allowed primarily for second hand vehicles and used clothes, I wasted time on "important" decisions standing in an isle at Target deliberating between a plastic or stainless steel garbage can. I frittered away the money God entrusted to me that could have been used to grow and bless his kingdom and those he directly calls us to serve. I was so immersed in my culture of consumption I could not even see the reality of my own addiction to self-serving, self-pleasuring life, and how that life disabled me from fully participating in God's kingdom work and the pleasure of deep relationship with him. Lord forgive me! I am stuck here!
I don't yet know what I will do with all of the stuff I don't need. Ternicielle is grateful to take the plastic I used to protect my mattress to fortify her roof against the next rains and the cardboard boxes to replace the damp ones that insulate her walls. I don't need 12 coordinated bath towels and I might be able to go on quite happily without 6 mixing bowls. I want to find some way to reverse my gluttony and bless others. I want to take joy in my relationship with Christ and those he has planted around me, and not in the fluff that can momentarily seem so important.
Please pray for me and Kirk and the boys that we will remain content with little and discontent with a lot.
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