One Sunday morning a few years ago, our church sanctuary was empty except for a few of us talking near the exit. My son, two at the time, was running between the pews, not yet tall enough to see over them, like he was adventuring through a medieval maze of ten-foot-high hedges.

These pews have built-in kneelers, padded benches that fold down to about six inches off the floor. Early in the service when the congregation confesses sins together, we fold them down to kneel for prayer. As he dashed between pews, my main concern was that he’d find a pencil, wield it as a sword and then trip and impale his eye. Instead, he stopped to pull down one of the kneelers, which dropped hard (fortunately his toes weren’t crushed). Then he paused and knelt like he’s seen us do in the service.

He got up, went to the next pew, pulled down the kneeler and knelt briefly. Then he went to the next. There are two or three kneelers per pew. He pulled down one after another, regularly stopping to kneel, then moving to the next. He was consumed by the task with all the concentration of a master craftsman. Eventually he pulled down enough kneelers for 125 people, half the church.

In the service an hour earlier, we had said aloud, “We confess that we are captive to sin and cannot free ourselves.. . . We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.”

I didn’t grow up in churches that had kneelers, but for the past nine years in this church I’ve been grateful for the weekly chance to confess at the beginning of worship. (When I make it to church on time, my wife would add—okay, there’s personal confession number one.) Over the past twenty years I’ve also learned that kneeling for confession is the right posture for entering into the work of justice—with humility, supplication and vulnerability. If we don’t lower ourselves before God and neighbors, we will fail at lasting change; we need to be transformed ourselves as we work for the world to become more just. The work of justice is interwoven with the need for healing, and anyone who wants to work for healing is invited to make confession a regular practice: “Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed” (Jas 5:16).

What tender hope we’re invited into through this promise. When we practice confession in our work for justice, we find freedom to work for the healing of others at the same time we are healed.

After college I was going to move to Europe to work with a refugee ministry. The missions agency first required us to spend four months training at their Chicago home office. During this time most other trainees spent time learning languages like Tagalog and German. I was going to live near London and decided not to work on an English accent, so I had extra time. In the small basement library I discovered the journals of the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher-theologian Søren Kierkegaard. I’m not sure I’d heard of him before. I had taken a few religion courses in college, but had majored in business and minored in political science. (My Christian college was generally more into Ronald Reagan’s free market than Søren Kierkegaard’s existential dilemmas.)

During those four months, I lost and found myself repeatedly in his journals. The intensity of Kierkegaard’s inner search has nourished my justice work ever since. He said that life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward. We slow down to look backward for self-examination and understanding so we can then better move forward. No, we won’t ever move forward with perfect understanding. But when this backward-forward movement includes confession, it can become a cycle of healing that frees us to see more clearly how to become agents of healing and justice.

The Gospel of Mark tells the story of Jesus arriving in Bethsaida, where people brought a blind man and asked Jesus to heal him.

He took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the village; and when he had put saliva on his eyes and laid his hands on him, he asked him, “Can you see anything?” And the man looked up and said, “I can see people, but they look like trees, walking.” Then Jesus laid his hands on his eyes again; and he looked intently and his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly. (Mk 8:23‑25)

Jesus led him step by step. The blind man followed step by step. The healing didn’t happen in a flash. Then Jesus touched the man and put spit on his eyes. It helped, but things were still blurry. People looked like trees. After doing it again, then the man could see clearly.

I love this story of gradual healing because it affirms how gradual the process often is to be healed and to help others to heal. Sin can blind us—so we are unaware of selfishness that leads us to exploit when we intend to help. Sin can blind us—so our hurts guide us instead of other people’s hopes. Sin can blind us—so we can’t see the needs under the surface.

We confess our temptations and vulnerabilities so we can be healed gradually, like the man in Bethsaida, both for what we have done and what we have left undone. Healing helps us to see so we can keep following, step by step, toward helping each other to flourish. As we see, we can be guided not by shame that blinds us but instead by a clearer vision of God’s kingdom.

Taken from Slow Kingdom Coming by Kent Annan. Copyright (c) 2016 by Kent Annan. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL 60515-1426. www.ivpress.com

Life is at times uncertain and unstable for most of us. This is truer and more frequent for those who live on the edge of survival. In Haiti, 80% of people live on less than $2 a day.

As though that slow-burn cruelty weren’t enough, five years ago the earth shook and buildings collapsed and more than 200, 000 people died. For about 30 merciless seconds on the afternoon of January 12, a 7.0 earthquake meant the uncertainty and instability applied even to the ground beneath their feet.

It forces questions like: Can you have faith? Can you keep hope?

I’m asked these questions regularly because I’ve worked in Haiti for the past eleven years. People see headlines from a distance and empathize with what they imagine must be a hopeless situation. They’re also questions I ask myself sometimes.

On this 5^th earthquake anniversary, I remember four-story buildings collapsed into a stack of concrete pancakes. I remember circling over Port-au-Prince in a small plane with other relief personnel six days after the earthquake, finally able to get there. I remember bodies being pulled from rubble. I remember it seemed to take so long for rebuilding to start. People responded generously around the world, though the overall impact has been hard to track. It has been encouraging to see building and infrastructure progress the past couple of years. Still, the big picture can make my faith and hope go a bit wobbly.

It’s when I think of people—and when I start reflecting on the earthquake, what comes to mind is people—that the sadness comes on stronger. But so does the reason for faith and hope.

I think of Enel, a pastor and colleague who somehow survived in one of those pancaked buildings. He was in a university class with fellow students. A moment later he was trapped under concrete and some of his classmates were dead in the rubble beside him. He crawled out and has made the most of the years since. He received the gift of life as something for him to give to help others, especially so young church leaders can work in their communities for justice, especially to help Haiti’s most vulnerable children.

I think of John. Together we started Haiti Partners two months before the earthquake. He’s lived in Haiti for most of the past 23 years. His commitment, respect for people, and knowledge of the country is profound. When his home outside of Port-au-Prince started shaking, he grabbed his two young children and ran outside. Every day since he has kept working for the hope that education and entrepreneurship can transform lives and communities.

I think of Juslaine, the grandmother of the family my wife and I first lived with when we moved to Haiti. Standing next to her collapsed small tin-roofed home, where we’d also lived, close to the earthquake’s epicenter, she said, “We’re alive, by God’s grace.” She shook her head looking around at the destruction. She also kept loving her family, teasing her grandkids. At her funeral two years ago, there was wailing, fainting, many tears. We packed into that church to mourn her death. But that church was also the place where Juslaine found hope and faith that strengthened her through life’s challenges.

I think too of Marvens, now five years old. His mom Marie-Ange was inside their small house when it started shaking. She ran out holding him, then a six month old baby. The house collapsed. Five years later, Marvens is attending an excellent school that didn’t exist before the earthquake, but has risen up through the hard work of local Haitians and the generosity of North Americans.

“With every crisis of faith, what we believe is crucified, and then we wait expectantly, whether in defeat or in joyful hope, to see what part of our faith is resurrected.” I wrote that sentence in my book After Shock soon after the earthquake, as we worked to respond to the tragedy. I was writing a kind of psalm because it felt like if I didn’t wrestle with God amidst the collapse, then I might lose hold of faith and hope, or they might lose hold of me.

And I do find that my faith keeps getting resurrected. I try to follow Jesus around the next bend, even if I lose sight of him sometimes. I’m able to follow a little better accepting that God doesn’t rescue us from suffering, but is with us in suffering.

And every day as so many people keep working with hope to make better lives and change their own country, and as I get to collaborate with Enel, John, Juslaine’s family, and Marvens, then I find that my tattered hope keeps getting resurrected too.

The rain roars down. That season has arrived. The rain might as well be tears, drenching hundreds of thousands of people in tents and under tarps [after the earthquake here in Haiti].

I’m back staying with the Woshdlo family [I used to live with] as I check on the rebuilding progress in our nearby schools. The family is all in one home talking and telling stories while waiting out heavy rain. The provisional house is holding. Père, the grandfather, comes and goes in these times. He won’t sit for too long. Having lived on this plot of land for sixty-seven years, he is long past letting rain paralyze him, even if he understands that the rest of his extended family prefers to stay dry.

Eventually he comes to get me. It’s late and everyone is ready to sleep. Though I could find my own way, Père wants to escort me to the little room in the provisional tin house where I’ll sleep.

We slog together through mud and water at least a foot deep. It’s slippery, so I lose and then retrieve a flip-flop a few times. Occasional lightning makes the path clear. We arrive at the little porch of the house and I’m getting ready to go in when Père stoops down to where he had put a bucket of water. Suddenly my foot is cradled in his hand and he’s gently washing off the mud.

I protest. No, I’ll do it. No, please don’t, Père. But there’s something holy about it. Of course I think of Jesus washing the disciples’ feet and their protesting. I’m humbled to silence. Père isn’t doing this because he’s subservient or feels like he has to. For more than seven years I’ve watched his humility, generosity and kindness.

The fruits of the Spirit listed in Galatians 5:22 have seemed too soft and too reinforcing of the status quo to me since realizing what the world is like. “Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” is a great list, but not enough. It should also include, based on other parts of the Bible, “risky compassion, discomfort with the comfortable, defiance in the face of injustice.” Read in a middle-class church, the original list can just strengthen self-satisfaction and complacency. Sure, it’s not easy to be all those things in your marriage or with colleagues or neighbors, but it’s a lot easier than giving up what I have to engage with people who are poor or challenging the very systems that help make life good for my family. The fruit of the Spirit—the fruit of being shaped to be more like Jesus—has to be more revolutionary.

I think about how I’m supposed to follow Jesus to love more—but then of course here I am, humbled and being loved far more than I can love. In thirty years, when I’m Père’s age, I hope I’ve become a little of the man he is. I look up to him in every way. I balance now on my clean foot just inside the doorway as he washes the mud covering my other foot.

He is full of dignity, confidence, stubbornness. He gets angry and yells at himself or just in general or occasionally at the grandkids when they’re disobedient—but always still with a twinkle in his eye.

I don’t want my soul shaped by the market or the latest technology or pride. I don’t want my ambition or my fears to shape me. I want to make a difference and support the right causes, but they’re not enough either.

Also by Kent: Poverty is a Moral Problem…Why Bill Gates & Rick Warren don’t have all the Answers

Let the philosophers and scientists and skeptics mock; even though I’d like to be more sophisticated—and it is more complex than this— I’ll just say what’s true as I’m here in the rain with Père: I believe in Jesus in part because Père believes. And I even believe in that revolutionary kingdom that Jesus says has come and is coming in and around us.

The same was true many a morning at 5 a.m., when only the roosters and Père were awake and I laid in bed in this house listening for an hour as Père prayed to God, asking for his provision (even for me and my family) but mostly thanking God in prayer and in song.

**NOTE: This post is an excerpt from . Used by permission of InterVarsity Press.

This Easter Sunday, we remember one of Kent’s reflections from the months right after the January 2010 earthquake. 

I arrive fifteen minutes into the church service—late in one obvious sense, but I had been there an hour earlier too when nobody had arrived yet, so to my credit, I’d been both early and late. The starting time wasn’t firm. The fact they are meeting at all is remarkable.

The church is a pile of rubble. Nothing left. The school beside it is damaged but standing. Nobody had been in the church when it collapsed, but one teacher died in the church school when the roof partially collapsed in his classroom.

The congregation is spread out in three clumps, each trying to find refuge under some kind of shade. One group is under a tree. I join a group of about a hundred people seeking shade near a still-standing outhouse. No room in the shade for this latecomer. I stand listening to the service, singing along to the familiar songs.

I am in the back row with the teenagers. And just to prove that there are some constant universals, even after a staggering natural disaster, even next to a collapsed church building, even with everyone in the congregation now homeless and sleeping outside—the teenagers are whispering, flirting and texting on their phones.

It’s distracting as I stand sweating, but also funny and comforting. (The world may collapse, but hormones and teenage love endure.)

The service goes on. It is incredible to be singing hymns of praise with them, some of whom I’ve known for a long time. My faith has always felt buoyed in church here. If our singing voices were made visible as colorful helium balloons released, mine would be straggling at the bottom, holding on to the strings of others for lift. (Even 0though I of course have the least material excuse for lack of faith of anyone here.) But it does lift—my song, my praise, together.

As the service moves toward Communion, I see Andre, the church deacon I’ve known since first moving to Haiti, start to make his way across the rubble. After the earthquake, I had walked on the rubble when I first got to town, and it’s precarious in spots. I can’t figure out what he’s doing up there in the middle of the service.

We are moving closer still to Communion, hearing about Jesus with his disciples in the upper room. Andre is up toward the front of the crumbled church now. He is reaching through a tangle of rebar, opening a small concrete cabinet.

Then I realize.

We’re singing together about the bread and the wine. “This is Christ’s body broken for you. This is Christ’s blood shed for you.”

Andre pulls out the Communion wafers. The only part of the building or furniture in the church that wasn’t smashed to pieces, which I hadn’t noticed when I’d been here before, was where they kept the Communion wafers.

Andre is carrying them back over the rubble, each step careful.

“This is my body broken for you.”

He makes his way to the rough wood table outside where Communion now happens.

“This is my blood shed for you.”

Off to the left is where the teacher died. A ten-minute walk away is where I almost broke down crying as I talked with the mother holding her son, whose father had died saving him.

“This is my body broken for you.”

The body of Christ in this place broken, literally broken bodies, broken homes, broken church building.

We line up to go forward and receive. In front of me is a grandmother.

She’s lost everything and sees her family and community devastated. She’s frail. She moves forward without hesitation in the line. A young man behind me. What dreams can he dream now? He keeps moving forward for the bread.

“This is my body broken for you.”

I arrive and the jagged Communion wafer—Christ’s presence, yes, Christ’s presence that did not stop the church from falling, that did not protect the teacher in the school or the dad on the porch, but Christ’s presence here in the pile of rubble and here in this group of people in a sun-struck yard—is placed on my tongue.

For the rest of the service I sit on some rocks, still without shade, next to Jean, whose legs are atrophied and folded under him. He can’t walk. He’s led a tough life with his disability. Before the earthquake, he always sat on the aisle in one of the front rows. When the first chord of the Communion song was struck, the song signaling we could come up front to receive the bread, the song whose chorus is “Vinn jwenn Jezi, Vinn jwenn Jezi, ” Come find Jesus, Come find Jesus, Jean would swing out and, using his hands and arms to propel himself, be first in line. He was always the first to come find Jesus.

And here in the rubble, come find Jesus.

Our God whose distance we don’t understand, whose distance we experience as so much suffering and uncertainty and mixed messages. And yet too our God who is right there with Jean first in line and now with people next to a pile of rubble, with their lost loved ones and lost homes down the various paths.

Communion finishes. Andre makes his way back gingerly over the pile to return what is left of the body, broken for us.

The broken God who couldn’t feel more distant/near to me in this moment on the rock next to Jean, a jagged Communion wafer dissolving in my stomach.

The rubble seems like evidence of God’s absence or abandonment and yet here I sit, taking and eating the rubbled body of Christ. Here, week after week, people come to find Jesus. The rubble may make him harder to find, but maybe, like the wafers in the center of this leveled church, he never left and never will.

Excerpt from After Shock by Kent Annan. Copyright © 2011 by Kent Annan. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press.

William Easterly, professor of economics at New York University, is one of the most prominent iconoclasts in the field of international aid. In 2006 he published White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. I talked with him on a frigid Manhattan day over hot green tea the day after the launch of his new book,  The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor (2014).

What are the “forgotten rights of the poor”?

The rights of the poor should be the same as the rights of the rich: the core, inalienable rights that started with the language of the Declaration of Independence, including the idea that governments exist by the consent of the governed.

There is an ongoing debate around the world between the advocates of freedom for the individual and the advocates for more authoritarian, powerful states like Russia and China, and seen in battles from Ukraine to Venezuela to Ethiopia.

The sad thing is that the field and practice of development have too often been on the wrong side of this debate. They’ve implicitly painted themselves into a corner where they’re on the authoritarian side. Then they’re backing the autocrats, backing the oppressors against the oppressed.

You are an economist, but this book seems to largely make a moral argument.

As an economist, to include such a strong moral dimension is a bit unusual. I start the book making it clear that the idea we can have a purely technical approach to resolving the problems of poverty without any moral implications is an illusion.

For me, this has been a long intellectual journey, from being one of the experts who was oblivious to the “rights of the poor” issue, to now criticizing those experts. In my development career, I worked closely at various times with autocratic governments and officials in places like Mexico and Russia and Pakistan, and in Africa with Ethiopia and Ghana before it was democratic.

Related: Christian Denial in an Age of Economic Disparity

I realized our attitude towards the poor is so often condescending and paternalistic. We think of them as helpless individuals. We don’t respect their dignity as individuals.

The next step was not to just avoid paternalism or condescension but actually to go back to first principles and think about the rights of the poor and what role those rights play in development. Economists’ research actually does give the institutions associated with individual rights a lot of the credit for the development in the West and the rest of the world. This combined with my own moral awakening that these rights are a desirable good in and of themselves. Whenever we violate them, we set back development.

Humility or self-restraint seems to be a theme through your work.

My cultural and faith upbringing contributed to the feeling of humility. I grew up in the Midwest, in Ohio, with a faith background that stressed humility, not being over-confident in your own wisdom, not being too self-important. That informs my openness to a critique of experts as being too arrogant in their own knowledge and too oblivious to the moral consequences of their overconfidence that can lead to doing damage to other people.

For example, if you work with the government of Ethiopia, you have to consider whether you may be indirectly contributing to someone being kept in jail for 18 years like Eskinder Nega, a peaceful blogger who made quite innocuous criticisms of the government.

Some people believe authoritarian development pays off and justifies violating someone else’s rights. But we have to be humble about the limits of our knowledge. It’s a strong burden of proof for someone to say, “We have good enough evidence that we’re willing to take away your rights to make you better off.”

You talk about Bill Gates in this context. He’s been giving away billions of dollars to help people. Where does he fit into your understanding of this?

I think Bill Gates is the poster child for the technocratic illusion—that alleviating poverty is purely a technical matter. That there is just a long list of technical solutions to finance. The illusion is that you are paying no attention to who is actually implementing these technical solutions and that there are no politics or moral choices involved in who is actually doing the implementing.

Of course, I’m not disagreeing with giving medicine to sick people. [The Gates Foundation] is doing great things with medical aid directly or indirectly throughout malaria-prone regions like Africa.

But Gates lavished praise on the government of Ethiopia in his annual letter last year, explicitly giving them all the credit for the reduction in child mortality in Ethiopia. He overlooks direct evidence that the government of Ethiopia is not at all benevolent. Unfortunately, Meles Zenawi and his successors have been serial human rights abusers.

But equally importantly, the data Gates celebrates is incredibly shaky. About the only safe thing we can say is that there is a significant child mortality decline, which we should all celebrate. It’s great—but it is a regional thing that’s happening all over Africa, and all over the world. No one government should get credit for this if it’s happening everywhere.

If Bill Gates would just talk about his technical solutions and the direct effects they would have on helping people with real needs, then I’m very sympathetic. It’s wonderful that he’s so generous with his own money. But why did he have to praise an oppressive, human-rights-abusing government, siding with the oppressor against the oppressed? There is a technocratic blindness to the moral dimension of development.

What about when some American evangelical Christian leaders get involved in, for example, Uganda or Rwanda?

I think Rick Warren, when he collaborates with President Kagame of Rwanda, is suffering from the same moral blindness as Bill Gates. You just have to open your eyes to the full picture and understand that autocracy is an evil system. I’m very comfortable in making that moral statement because autocracy does things to people without their consent.

And Kagame is committed to maintaining autocracy at all costs. People are overlooking clear evidence of indirect involvement in war crimes in the Congo, assassinations and attempted assassinations of political opponents. Kagame is understandably concerned about protecting minority rights after the genocide. But he’s also been involved in wars that are creating misery and death and suffering, and backing people who are accused of war crimes. And then somehow, Kagame is able to turn on the charm for American church leaders. It baffles me.

Much of your analysis is at a high level, focusing on World Bank or government interventions in other countries. Does this idea of rights apply to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and even to small nonprofit efforts?

The larger the NGO, the more these issues are serious and relevant. Also, a large NGO that has a major operation in a small country could be affecting the political outcome in that country, maybe indirectly lending support to an oppressive autocrat in power.

And even with a small NGO, you want to make sure that you are respecting the rights and dignity of the people you’re working with and allowing them to choose what’s happening under your project. That you’re not forcing your project on them. It’s very much based on their consent, their choice of what they want to happen. They need to be included in some important way in the project design and implementation.

And whether a big NGO or working on a small scale, in development there is often a power differential between the actors and those being, well, acted upon.

I’m glad you mentioned power. In development we tend to ignore the question: Who has the power?

That’s another way of stating the infeasibility of moral neutrality. We are never neutral because there are always power implications of what we’re doing. By acting in an applied way in a poor society, first of all, as you pointed out, we, the NGOs or the philanthropists, have a lot of power ourselves. We have to choose how to use that power in a way that does not make the people we’re trying to help have less power or feel like something is being imposed on them. We also have to be sure our power is not in an alliance that will ripple out to support an oppressive power elsewhere in the society.

And an oppressive power is not always just a national dictator. It could also be local elites who are oppressing the more powerless victims. Sensitivity to power requires always trying to identify who has the power, and trying to help the powerless to avoid being victimized by those in power.

Have you seen any difference of between faith-based and non-faith-based NGOs, whether for good or ill, in this respect?

I don’t have enough detailed knowledge of all the NGOs to give a good answer to that question. But one thing that comes to mind is the role of faith more generally in economics, which I think could have some implications for the NGO world. There’s been good research by economists that suggest there are real, positive impacts of believing in God on many outcomes at the individual and family level.

There could be many reasons for that. One reason that we could apply to NGOs is that there is a struggle to get NGOs to do good things when there’s no one observing whether they are, in fact, doing good things or not. I think one way in which a belief in a just God helps is that you have the feeling that even when no human actor is watching, God is watching you and that motivates you to good things.

Also by Kent: 5 God Excuses to Avoid After a Natural Disaster

This sounds like a really weird mash-up of economics theories with belief in God. But it solves a problem an economist would call “the principal–agent problem”—that a principal wants someone to do good things and then finds an agent to do those things on his or her behalf. This becomes a problem if the principal cannot observe whether the agent is doing what they want or not.

If the agent believes that God is watching, that does help.

Any advice for a 20-year-old reading this article who wants to “change the world”?

I love young people who want to change the world!

I think we need rebalancing. A large share of the effort has been going to direct technical solutions to poverty. But this has neglected the other option of advocacy and education for rights as an important moral goal. Rights also work to promote development.

It’s most effective to advocate for a principle and then protest specific violations of that principle. It’s not just about rhetoric or soaring language. It’s protesting, for example, the World Bank project in Uganda that burned down farmers’ homes and took their land away from them.

The Civil Rights movement inspires me. They were advocating a simple principle: that blacks and whites should have equal rights. Then their advocacy was protesting very specific violations of that principle with sit-ins at lunch counters and the freedom rides on buses. Demonstrations from Selma and Birmingham. They were showcasing rights violations by the local oppressors.

We need to identify our principles and protest specific violations, to get those principles more widely accepted.

This article originally appeared at ChristianityToday.com

Photo Credit: Anna Omelchenko / Shutterstock.com

For the first time in history, one of every two people lives in a city. Some 860 million of these city-dwellers reside in slums—uncertain, cramped, and frequently cruel. Most are there by necessity.

A small number of Christian missionaries live in slums too. They are there by choice.

About 100 of them, mostly from the United States, New Zealand, and Australia, met near Bangkok this past April. They gathered under the banner of “New Friars.”

The New Friars don’t seem to merit high-profile attention. Their efforts to alleviate poverty are small next to the work of many missionary and nonprofit groups and the problems they address.

Yet we do well to listen to the New Friars, because of the way they themselves are listening to God and neighbor, to suffering and hope on the crowded margins of society. They address vital questions about missions today, and about how all Christians might practice our vocations with sacrifice, devotion, and hope.

I knew some of these missionaries. I had read books by others. I had experimented with similar ideals in my own life. So I was eager to see their ideas in action. What better time to do so than over the weekend marking the culmination of Jesus’ life?

Standing in line in Bangkok’s gleaming airport, I pass a smarmy man in his 60s who looks like a star in a sex tourism documentary. He’s not the only one. Bangkok rings luridly in the American imagination. I pray to God that some Thai woman won’t have to open herself to him.

Read the rest over at ChristianityToday.com >>

Photo Credit: 1000 Words / Shutterstock.com

Together:
We stand with hope, but not forgetting collapse.
We commit to love, and so to both grief and change.

We seek God’s grace and presence, though in the midst.

We move forward with:
with people in Haiti,
with you,

with gratitude.

John & Kent and the Haiti Partners team
invite you to watch the following videos: an update from Haiti and song:

SONG WRITTEN AND COMPOSED BY WOZO, Haiti Partners Youth Choir
Words in English:

January 12th, a day of terror and tears.
Eyes and hearts of Haitians filled with pain,
January 12th, a day of terror and tears.
Eyes and hearts of Haitians filled with pain
A horrific disaster, followed by cholera, and misery
take so many to their death

Your blood spilled,
and your souls live on and you are with us,
Giving your fellow Haitians strength
for the work of rebuilding Haiti

—
Kent Annan is author of the book After Shock: Searching for Honest Faith When Your World is Shaken. He is co-director of Haiti Partners and also author of Following Jesus through the Eye of the Needle. (100% of the author proceeds from both books go to education in Haiti.) You can connect with him on Twitter

That meaningless gong and fleeting cymbal are the apostle Paul’s characterization of religious and charitable acts that don’t have love. They are nothing.

Surely the same applies to grieving. And so if as a society we aren’t doing all we can to protect our children, our teenagers, our people, from murderous gun sprees, then we lack love. And then we lack the ability–or the right–to grieve.

If I don’t grab the hand of a sinking man whom I could have reached, then I can’t grieve his drowning. If you don’t feed the hungry woman from your stocked pantry, then you can’t grieve her starvation. If we don’t take tools away from the demented that enable them to multiply their evil, we don’t get to express shock, horror, and sadness when that multiplying evil is unleashed.

Related: Mass Killing is Our Idea of Patriotism by Frank Schaeffer

It lays bare our lack of love, and without love our words and grief are nothing.

Words like senseless, inexplicable, unimaginable must for now be banned from our grief liturgy about gun violence in this country. For what happened in that elementary school (and on the Chicago streets, etc.) makes sense, can be explained, and is not only imaginable but predictable based on all that has happened before.

The ability to authentically grieve in response to tragedy is earned by a society. How? By engaging for justice, by protecting the vulnerable, by doing all we can, often by paying a cost. That is, by love.

Mr. President and politicians and those with power on this issue, with all due respect, you don’t get to receive this news as just parents. Not this time. Not again. Especially not those who work to keep the armaments open wide. You must receive the news as people who have taken roles that can help turn our national grieving away from hypocrisy.

Related: The God Who Cries When Children Die by Kurt Willems

If we have integrity, let’s confess that we have forfeited the right to grieve as a nation for these young children. The families and community are grieving horribly; our hearts demand that we also grieve with them as individuals (my daughter is a 1st grader). But we have forfeited as a nation the right to lower any flags. We have forfeited the right as a nation to take a moment of silence before NFL games (before young men risk their brains for our entertainment). We don’t deserve the catharsis of national mourning. We haven’t earned national grief under a resounding gong that sounds like church bells ringing ceaselessly for funerals of the innocent.

The biblical book of James says, “Faith, if it has no works, is dead.” The same with our grief for these tragedies, if it has no works.

Let’s not desecrate this tragedy with bullshit national grieving, empty words, impotent tears. Instead let’s protect our children, so that, first and foremost, we avoid many of these future slaughters and, second, so that when tragedy strikes again, for yes it will always strike again, then at least we will have earned the right, as a nation, to weep honestly together.

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Kent Annan is author of the book After Shock: Searching for Honest Faith When Your World is Shaken. He is co-director of Haiti Partners and also author of Following Jesus through the Eye of the Needle. (100% of the author proceeds from both books go to education in Haiti.) You can connect with him on Twitter

This comes to mind today — now — after conversations both with friends in Haiti and my sister in Manhattan in Sandy’s wake. After Haiti’s earthquake, I wrote about avoiding these kinds of statements in this excerpt:

We grope at straws trying to make sense of the suffering. To fill the silence, we say things that are sincere but sometimes silly. We find slivers of Scripture that prop up our defense, but do we want the kind of God that the logic of our straw-patched statements creates?

“What a miracle how that girl was pulled from the rubble!”

The straw God spoken into being by this statement is one whose power and compassion are disturbingly out of whack. If God could orchestrate the rescue of the one, then why wouldn’t God have protected the many in the first place?

Also by Kent Annan: Kony 2012 and the Golden Rule: How Do ‘We’ Tell ‘Their’ Story?

Friends in Port-au-Prince told me about an 8-year-old girl who survived when the building she was in collapsed — but her mom and sister died in front of her, and her father had died some years ago. She wandered the streets in shock. Days later someone found her and got her back to her village. At that point, do you say, “What a miracle of God that she survived and was brought back to her village”? Isn’t that like a babysitter taking your three children out for a canoe ride, returning with only one — because the other two drowned — and then expecting to be congratulated for bringing back one of the three alive?

“Well, people down there have always been really poor, right?” Or “They believe in Voodoo, right?”

Most people avoid saying these types of statements (one prominent TV personality aside) because when said aloud the monstrous logic is so clear. But I have heard them spoken in conversations, and they often seem to linger in the background as a way to find some order. The logic implied is that God’s rain falls on the just and unjust, but God’s judgment is highly selective and tends to fall especially hard on those who are poor (and whose skin isn’t white). But what about my friend Emmanual? He is a pastor and a motorcycle taxi driver. When the earthquake struck, he was out working on his motorcycle. Hundreds of people in his church (including two of his sisters and a brother) were together at a prayer service in the name of Christ. They were all killed. God, then, must not judge only harshly — at least that would be consistent — but also capriciously and disproportionately. The victims are to blame for the crime.

“At least they’re in a better place now.”

Even if we believe eternal life is true, which I do, that doesn’t reduce present suffering, does it? And it’s not a fair dismissal of suffering, because God put such value on this life. Nobody, not believer or atheist or anyone in between, is certain about whether there is a next life. Conceivably any suffering on earth could be eclipsed by the goodness of what is to come, but meanwhile a statement like this simply creates a monstrous God for whom the ends (even if they torture people) justify the means.

“Isn’t it amazing that we … happened to be there at just the right time to help?”

This self-help God provides suffering to some as an opportunity for others to express compassion or work on self-improvement. This wouldn’t be an all-bad God if everyone made it through. Suffering can be positive for both the helpers and those being helped. But it’s far from positive for everyone. Some die. Some suffer too much to ever recover. Others fail the opportunity for self-improvement and live lives of disappointment (often taken out on their own children).

Also by Kent Annan: What Can We Say? Theology for Murder and for Living

And doesn’t this create a God who is a buffoon of a logistician — who can coordinate getting one group into the perfect place, but for some incompetence couldn’t get the young mother off the porch before the concrete blocks collapsed on her?

“We might not understand, but it’s all part of God’s plan.” Or “It was meant to be.”

Wouldn’t any plan this flawed be sent back for major revisions before it could be put into place? The architect says, “Here’s the building design, but occasionally the elevator will malfunction and a dozen or so people will plummet to death. The water piped in for the daycare is occasionally radioactive and will cause slow, painful deaths for some of the children. Oh, and the entire building will collapse in the middle of the business day every few years, but we’ll rebuild.” Um, back to the drawing board please. This platitude about God’s plan is often said citing the verse in Romans 8:28 that “all things work together for good, ” but surely the assertion of faith is that “in all things God works for the good of those who love God, ” that God eventually overcomes evil with good, not that all this madness is part of a detailed plan.

But without these simplifications, what can we say to fill the heavy silence? The simple answers are all unsatisfying as attempts to settle the aftershocks of suffering. Hopefully, in faith and doubt, part of faithfulness is to keep asking, listening and asking again.

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Kent Annan is author of the new book After Shock: Searching for Honest Faith When Your World is Shaken. He is co-director of Haiti Partners and also author of Following Jesus through the Eye of the Needle. (100% of the author proceeds from both books go to education in Haiti.)

Photo Credit: Mel Evans/AP

I work with a non-profit focused on education in Haiti, and Fred is one of 25 Haitian seminary students we give full scholarships to and who intern with us. I was about to introduce the students to our board of directors.

“Yes, no problem.”

“Thanks, Fred. And how are you?”

“Good. You and your family?”

“They’re well, thanks. And your family?”

Fred pauses. He’s in his mid-20s. His charismatic spark usually shadows his slight frame, but I’m realizing it’s not lit today.

“I’m OK, ” he says. “But, well, my younger brother was murdered last night. I found out this morning.”

What can you say?

Nothing, of course.

What can you say?

Ask. Feel your heart break a little next to his. Find out his brother’s name was Macdonald. That he was fifteen. That they were robbers who killed him in the sometimes-unsafe neighborhood where their family lives. That on days when Fred couldn’t get home because of his studies, his mom would send Macdonald up with dinner for him.

Fred then stands in front of our group to graciously welcome us to his campus. (After he told me the news, we talked and then I suggested someone else do it. But he wanted to.) Alongside studies, these students engage in the hard, complicated work of helping churches to improve their education and to take more responsibility to protect vulnerable, exploited children in their communities.

Seminary is a time to learn about big “What can you say?” type questions, which are searingly unacademic for Fred right now. Practice and theory should crash into each other. Just not so violently.

Fifteen years ago, I was a second-year seminary student. I studied in Princeton, which is about as far from Fred’s reality as imaginable. I’m grateful seminary helped aim the trajectory of my thinking, my faith and the work I do. He and the other Micah Scholars are promising leaders who wanted to go to seminary but didn’t have the means. They deserve the chance too; good both for them and their communities. It’s an honor to be part of doing this for Fred. But there’s something more. I’m humbled to get to do this work and this searching about God and life with him.

Early Sunday morning, two days later, I attend Fred’s church with some of my visiting friends. The church was gray unfinished concrete all around, floor, walls, ceiling. The orange and red plastic flowers in front of the pulpit were slightly wilted. The singing and worship was anything but. Gospel-type hymn singing was drenched in holy sweat and pushing the speakers to wattage-crackling limits. Faith achieved lift-off from the rough floor on the spirited songs and prayers of hundreds of voices squeezed close on wood benches.

The pastor preached (again, speakers crackling) about tragedy — the earthquake, the death of Fred’s brother — and about the kind of faith that doesn’t crumble. They took an offering and many people who have very little walked to the front to put coins and crumpled bills in a wooden box to help Fred’s family. After helping with funeral logistics, Fred had arrived late at church to teach Sunday school.

The service ended. We said goodbye and hugged Fred in another of those moments when silence, speaking and actions need to find a way to rhyme:

To tell him we care about him and that we’ll pray for him … but not to pretend that’s enough.

To stand with him in faith … but not say “It’s all in God’s plan” or some such theological opiate.

To not let the pain and mystery cower us into silence … about the hope we still somehow hold.

To do something real to keep helping. Because if we don’t, any theology and comforting words rightly collapse. But if we do, hopefully we take another step together toward love and truth.

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Kent Annan is author of the new book After Shock: Searching for Honest Faith When Your World is Shaken. He is co-director of Haiti Partners and also author of Following Jesus through the Eye of the Needle. (100% of the author proceeds from both books go to education in Haiti.)