Currency

I mentioned in my earlier post how the exchange rate between the Haitian dollar and the U.S. dollar is an ever widening gap in favor of the U.S. This is bringing even more difficulty for an already hideous economy. If you go to Haiti to find any sort of financial hope, you're in for a nasty rebuff. Could there ever be a future where this changes? Of course, but we're a long ways away from that. However, there is a currency woven into the fabric of this culture where the exchange rate favors the Haitians by a margin that makes the current dollar exchange rate look insignificant. It's the currency of relationship, and the Haitians are very rich in this area. This subject surfaced in a conversation I held with a friend tonight on the phone. Our culture is actually becoming proficient at inventing ways to drive ourselves into isolation from each other. At one point I myself was a pretty big proponent of Face Book. But it's really not socially relevant. It puts us in places of even more isolation. We are meant to be together, to be in the same space, Face Book gives us license to think its okay when we're not. I get it when we're states apart, but we have been reduced to quips and clips, not complete thoughts shared back and forth in a dialogue stream. At one point in time as we were waiting for youth service to start Sunday afternoon (which was supposed to start at 3:00 pm and didn't start until after 4:00), rather than wasting energy like his counterparts the Americans on fretting about when we should start, Robinson sat down with Claudy in chairs next to each other and proceeded to shoot the breeze for roughly 30 minutes. No stewing, no wasted energy on what they couldn't control, they literally redeemed the time in relational currency. Would to God I could get better at this. We always feel the need to fill time with some project, something that turns time into money, not one wasted minute we say, and yet in the currency of relationship, time is also gold. The mines of time in the States are swollen rich with this kind of gold, but we keep dashing past the entrances steaming our way to meet the demands of the culture to own our toys, our houses, our lands, our cars, our retirements, and then we're dead. Death claims all things material, and we pass bankrupt on the one thing that will have mattered most, relationship. Both with fellow man and God. I don't mean to be judgmental here, just to till up the soil of our hearts. I find myself in need of adjustment here all the time, and when I hit Haiti and encounter these relational people I become radically aware of my need for working on finding better balance in this area of my life. To build my treasury not in moth and rust, but in Christ and people. These are just more thoughts as I settle back into our cultural norms, trying to avoid the callouses that are prone to reappear on my heart as I race to catch back up from being gone for a week. What a dilemma we are in, finding faster ways to get things done, only to fill the time with finding yet even more faster ways to get things done. While the most important thing goes mostly undone! May God help us adjust, as we head quickly toward cultural bankruptcy in this department of currency. May He save us from our strange bent to isolation before the isolation kills us. Blessings always!