Today my sister and I watched a documentary called The Miracle Baby of Haiti. Here is a small clip. It’s only a minute long; take a look.
As we watched, my sister turned to me and our glassy eyes and downtrodden faces met as we both said, “This is so sad.”
“Then why are you watching it? Turn it off.” This is said as she nurses her baby who is the same age as the little girl featured in the documentary, so I could only imagine the pain she felt as she may have imagined if that had been her own baby girl.
I watched a documentary with my little sister called Angels in the Dust about orphans in Africa who are afflicted with HIV/AIDS because of rape and trafficking. My little sister almost got angry as she requested I turn it off because “it was so sad.” She didn’t want to watch it.
How many times do we see something that causes us emotional pain and have that reaction? “This is so sad . . . turn it off.” Really. Why are we inclined to look the other way? Because we don’t like the pain. Because it makes us uncomfortable. Because if we know about something that truly hurts our heart, we come into conflict with ourselves about how we continue our lives not doing anything about it.
Yet…so many of us do.
I told her, “Just because it is painful and sad to watch, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t acknowledge what is happening.”
Why do we feel that overwhelming urge to fast-forward through those heart-wrenching support-mercials. You know the ones. The Humane Society support-mercial with Celine Dion singing in the background. The support-mercial of an organization requesting support to feed dirty, shoeless, starving children walking and living their lives in garbage. If someone presents a desperate need like disease, starvation, trafficking, homelessness, or violence, people squirm in their seats. You’re empathetic towards the victims, but it makes you uncomfortable. It’s just easier to pretend that those issues don’t exist in your world. You can justify spending that $5 on a cup of coffee when you don’t know or acknowledge the fact that the men and women and children work all day for less than a dollar a day picking those beans that make that coffee. It’s easy to spend $100 on jeans when you don’t think about or acknowledge the very real possibility that a child in some Asian country worked days and nights in dangerous factory conditions for extremely little pay to make those jeans. These children are forced to work in order to try and help their families survive and not starve to death. It is so easy to complain about not being able to afford that new iPhone, iPad, iWhatever, when you don’t think about or acknowledge the millions of people around the world who would be thankful to simply have one small meal a day; when you don’t know that in many parts of the world, mothers have to feed their children mud or have them sniff glue so that they will actually be able to sleep without crying out of severe hunger.
I lived in that world. I insulated myself from the brokenness of this world. I tried to focus just on my life. But God changed that. My eyes were open and my heart was broken and I will never be the same.
Part 2 Coming Soon.
