Sitting on the sands...

I took this picture standing in the middle of the bay on a sandbar just off the coast of Percin, a slum in Haiti. The villagers took us out to the sandbar to marvel at the beauty of the Haitian land. We were rowed out there in a huge boat that was made from a burnt and dug out tree trunk. The guys who took us out there were so funny, they spoke little English, but the bit they did know they were taught by two American University students who had spent last summer there teaching English to kids. Sitting and rocking back and forth, back and forth in this boat, I couldn't beleive my eyes. Were they playing tricks on me? Our missions team had just walked from the dilipated buildings of the city street, where street vendors sold old tennis shoes or used electronics and where little children ran around playing games with no parent supervision, and we walked through the slum of Percin, with the hundreds of tiny shacks with mudfloors and few with tin roofs, with children staring out at us from behind their walls, through the holes in their walls, with holes in their own clothes. Walking down to the water, to the shore-side, through this broken village where I had never seen such depravity, I admit there were doubts in my mind. How could a God exist in a place like this, where the people actually have nothing? How could a God be here and not help and show love to these people? How could he let it get this bad for them? But then, sitting in the makeshift canoe, 100 yards away from the shore, I was baffled by how beautiful it was. I had just seen such poverty and ugliness, and now I was faced with the beauty of the world, of God's creation. I could see some old sailboats harbored nearby with big sails, the rocky hills of Haiti reaching up and dissappearing into mountains hidden by clouds, the bright, hot sun shining way high above our heads. God is here. He was there in the slums too. He was in the children's laughs, their smiles, the nature of the villages to care and love for us, different people from a different world who they didn't even know...

Sitting on the sands of the shores of life, each new day laps at my toes with the rising tide. I find myself amazed at everything-- at life, at love, at the beauty of nature. I know that life is what you make it. Tomorrow will be nothing unless you make it something. No matter what they say or what they do-- you are in charge of your life and you do hold your future, your destiny, the rest of your life in your own hands.

"The whole of human nature is a metaphor of the human mind." -Emerson