Walls and Faith

photo credit: Beth McHoul

There are some aspects of poverty that my mind simply can't fully absorb.

Every week we hear sad, complex stories in this poverty soaked country.

Like a crash test dummy hitting a wall with unspeakable force, I hear these stories, and my mind crashes into the same kind of wall with what feels like the same kind of gut-jarring impact.  Some times, there is no going through the wall that divides me with my US passport, white skin, and expensive education from the women I come in contact with at Heartline.

I have a lot in common with the women we see every week.  Thankfully there are some things, a few gifts straight from God, that He has declared off limits and out of poverty's wicked reach.  We love our babies fiercely.  We hope for them.  We want to do right by our children.

But mostly there are differences about our life that separate us.  That thick wall of diversity is real and impenetrable.  You can't go over it. You can't go under it.  It's so big and foreign that you'd have to search the rest of your life to find its ending in order to walk around it.

I can walk part of this journey with these ladies that we love, but because I'm a wealthy, US citizen, and they are not, there are times when their painful journey continues and I am unable to follow.  They walk through an invisible door in that wall.  We're not allowed to pass or travel with them.

Because we would never fully understand their world.  Never.

White, wealth, and power are built into my DNA.  Changing those elements of my life would be as impossible as changing my blood type. 

Yesterday, once again, we felt ourselves slammed into that wall that exists between those who have and those who have not.

One of the ladies who has been a part of Heartline's community for a long time came in and said her 15 year old daughter had just died.

This teenage girl never ran a fever.  She did not have diarrhea.  She was not vomiting.  She was never really sick.  Her stomach hurt.  She started seizing.

Then she died.

Tragic.

This mother has endured so much over her lifetime.

Now she must add the death of her 15 year old daughter to her already overflowing plate of suffering.

The most tragic part to me?

Her oldest daughter mysteriously and suddenly dies, and this mother will never know why.

She will never know the reason.

As we were hearing this heartbreaking story yesterday, my American mind kept asking the same questions...

"How did she die?  What happened?"

Once again, I was forced to stand there and witness poverty rip away what most Americans would consider a basic right.

To know the truth.

To know what happened.

To have some answers.

A healthy 15 year old girl up and dies in the States without so much as a fever? It would be a priority to find out why.

An American mother would cry herself to sleep that night missing her daughter, but a mom like me would at least know what happened.  What went wrong.

Just about every other day I fall asleep in this country telling God the same thing over and over.

"It's so unfair here.  So unfair."

There was a time when my theology was a comfort to me.  In hard times it offered answers and firm places for me to grip onto in order to survive difficult situations in my life.

Seeing what we see every day has been difficult spiritually.  It's an odd situation to feel fully sustained by God, and to know without a doubt that He is near.  He is here.  And yet I find myself admitting to God how hard it is to like Him or to even want to love Him in Haiti.

If David Letterman was doing a top 10 list entitled "Things You'd Never want to Hear a Missionary Say", well..."I don't even like God most days" might be on that list.  

All authority, all governments are put in place because God ordained it should be so?  That used to be exciting to me when I lived in the US. I liked thinking about that verse during elections and on the fourth of July as I ate watermelon and watched fire works.

Looking at Haiti's piece of crap government and the oppressive effects of corrupt officials, and simultaneously thinking of God's sovereignty is hard to think through.

Three year old girls getting raped in tent cities?  Six year old children trafficked for a few dollars for sex? People getting cholera and dying 24 hours later? Just because they didn't have clean water? UN soldiers paying poor, vulnerable women in Haiti for sex?

Hard to reconcile those things with what I learned in Sunday School.

Maybe things only added up in perfectly aligned columns and rows when I lived in the US.  I don't know.

There are days when I beg God to let me go back to that place where it felt like I knew most of the answers.  When I was smug in my knowledge of God, the Bible, and Jesus. I was obnoxious, but everything felt so much lighter...easier in that place.

The only thing I cling to as my faith gets hit by a train in this country is knowing that God authored my faith.  He was the reason for it.  And He promises to perfect it.  Part of Haiti's job, part of poverty's job is to perfect my faith.  To grow it.  To wash away the lies, the pride, and all things phony.  As much as I don't want to grow as a response to someone else's suffering, and as much as I don't like God right now, my heart loves Him and my soul can feel His strong, gentle hands holding me through this.

I can't understand what a lot of these women are going through in Haiti. That wall of poverty is strong and thick and separates us in many ways.  Unlike me and the people of Haiti, it brings me great peace to know that Jesus has already felt every emotion I will ever feel.  He knows how to pray for me.  There is no wall that separates me from Him and all that my soul feels from all that His felt as He walked this earth.

My theology and the fact that God is sovereign does not help me fall asleep at night in Haiti, but knowing Jesus stared severe poverty in the face...He touched it, held it in His hands, smelled it and yet still died for this plan is the only thing I can hold onto right now.

I want answers about faith.  I want to know why God allows people to suffer so much.

I want answers for this mother who lost her oldest child.

I stand here demanding an autopsy of the Christian life, and of this dead child, knowing we will get neither.


I hugged that grieving mother yesterday and the only words I could offer her on this side of the wall were, "I'm so sorry.  I love you."

She will walk the rest of her road without any of us.  No matter how hard we try, or how much we think we want to relate to this mother, we will never understand what it's like to live without knowing why a child suddenly died.

I want to believe that God will comfort this mother and walk with her on the other side of that obscene, impassible wall that is a glaring monument to sin, a broken world, corruption, and poverty.

The fact that I even want to believe that reminds me the Author and the Perfecter is at work in me.  Whether I want Him to be or not, because of His grace, He is.