I absolutely hate the phrase ‘compassion fatigue’ and I always have.  And today I hate it with more passion than I ever have.  It seems to me that ‘compassion fatigue’ is a phrase which gets used by comfortable people who live in comfortable places with comfortable lives. Compassion fatigue is by definition a luxury.

Yesterday, I met a church leader who pastors a church of 7,000 people. After talking to him for a while I about his amazing vision for his church I asked him: ‘what is your biggest personal challenge as a Christian in Haiti?’  His answer was: ‘my biggest challenge is that the need just keeps coming.  And the more need you meet the need the more it just keeps coming.’  Was he a candidate for compassion fatigue? Yes.  Did he have compassion fatigue? Absolutely not, because he doesn’t have the luxury of that choice.

Today we’ve spent the day with the church we might be working with to fund a building so they can run a Child Survival Programme (CSP).  We took Nellie the Compassion ‘big blue elephant’ to their school (we’ve discovered that most schools in Haiti are in churches).  At the school we met 200 amazing, fun and happy children — we played with the elephant and some  with balloons with them.  The joy on their faces was priceless.

Later, we stopped to film some of the Bible readings we’re using at Spring Harvest.  Three young boys joined our team for an hour.  Initially they were full of bravado as only teenagers can be.  As they began to trust us they began to tell us their stories. 

Each had lost their parents in the earthquake, each had nowhere to live, each of them had nobody who cared about them.  So they stuck together – three boys with nothing and nobody so they look after each other because they know that’s the only way they’ll survive.

Someone once said that ‘your perspective  is shaped by what you see when you first open your curtains in the morning.’  I don’t know about you but when I look out in the morning I see a leafy street and the school opposite my house.  I don’t see 600,000 people living in tents, I don’t see street children, I don’t see people scratching a living by selling stuff on the streets, I don’t see parents robbed of all their hopes and dreams, I don’t see children orphaned by an earthquake begging for food.  I don’t see any of that.

Compassion fatigue says that ‘the needs are so great, and the little I can do won’t make a difference so I won’t even try.’  It’s a lie, an excuse and a choice that only comfortable people can make. Nobody I’ve met in Haiti makes that choice – not the Compassion team, not the church leaders I’ve met and definitely not three young street boys with nobody and nothing who’ve chosen to help their friends.

So if these people can find a place in their hearts to reach out and help, why can’t we? Because choice is a luxury only the comfortable have.

Grace and love

Wendy

x

Welcome to Haiti read the sign at the airport. Once through customs and immigration we joined a bustling mass of people.  It’d be easy to think that they were normal travellers but after listening to their conversations it turned out that pretty much everyone on the plane was here to see how they could help the Haitian people rebuild their country.  Realising that there is such a desire to help was inspiring.

As most of you reading this know, every year at Spring Harvest we take up an offering and give this money away to charities doing amazing work.  In 2012 we’ve called our offering ‘No Ceiling to Hope’ and we’ve come to Haiti on behalf of Spring Harvest to find out if there is a church we can partner with to help them ‘demonstrate the love of God to the most needy in their community.’  Given all I saw yesterday I’m totally confident that we’ll find loads of churches we can partner with.

We’re really grateful to our friends at Compassion for enabling me, Abby Guinness, Krish Kandiah, Bekah Legg and Damian Wharton to come here on behalf of the Spring Harvest community.  We’ve brought a film crew with us from OH TV to document our experiences – the people we meet, the places we visit and the impact the church is having – also with us are our friends Ian Hamilton and Steve Bunn from Compassion UK.

We arrived in Haiti yesterday and spent the day travelling and orientating ourselves to the people and the places we’re going to visit.  And I have to say it was totally overwhelming (a word I think I’ll be using a lot this week).  To be lifted out of your regular life and dropped into a place so different from your own life creates a weird sense of alternative reality. Almost every experience is different to what I see at home – instead of empty leafy streets I saw masses of people because in Haiti 85% of adults are unemployed, instead of houses I saw tents, instead of people living in comfort I saw people making the best of life under terrible conditions.  It was overwhelming.

We went out for food to a Chinese restaurant.  We had a great time talking about our hopes and dreams for the trip.  I’m really passionate that the people we meet know that we don’t come with any other agenda than to serve them and what God is doing through them. I’m not even sure whether I want to use the phrase ‘help them’ – which of course we do but the phrase doesn’t sit well with me… I’m sure I’ll blog more on that.

When we came out of the restaurant we faced what we hadn’t seen when we drove up – we saw the tent village.  Between us and them was a road – 18 feet between our side where we eat great food and can keep asking for more just because we want to try new food and their side where they eat nothing or our leftovers. 18 feet isn’t much – yesterday it felt like an ocean.

For me personally I guess this trip is about finding out how we navigate all the roads we discover that feel like an oceans.  In doing that, I’m sure we’ll find our place in the bigger story of what God is doing in the world.

With love and grace

Wendy

Notes:

I’m blogging with a day delay on this trip so you get the ‘live feed’ of what’s going on but I also get some to process what I’m experiencing.

Compassion are helping us identify a church we can work with to fund them building some infrastructure to host a Child Survival Programme.  There is a real problem in Haiti with infant mortality basically lots of children aren’t surviving their early years.

Of course we’ll be asking questions about how the money we give can be used most effectively, and of course we’ll do all the necessary checks on financial integrity. 

I’ve been on trips like this before.  I was in Bosnia and Croatia during the war – I met people so poor that they had resorted to eating grass, people who’d been tortured, others had seen horrific things happen to their family and friends – all of them people who’d lost everything both materially and emotionally because of the war.  Somehow I think what I’m about to see will be different.  Bosnia needed help because a war had ravaged the country.  Haiti needs help because an earthquake ravaged the country.  

We’ve called this offering ‘No Ceiling to Hope’ – we totally believe there isn’t a ceiling to hope whether you’re in a war zone or in a place of extreme poverty.  God’s love demonstrated through acts of kindness, grace and compassion can ‘break every chain’ – emotional, spiritual or physical – which seek to ensnare us.

As Spring Harvest, we also totally believe that ‘the Church is God’s hope for the world’.  That wherever we are, whatever our context – God calls his people to reach out in love and grace to those around them whether they’re in the church or totally outside it.  One of the things I’m most looking forward to about this trip is seeing the love of God made real through the corporate Church and through individual Christians in Haiti. I’m sure their lives will be incredibly challenging.

I’m excited and a bit scared about what I’m about to experience… I know we’ll see plenty of need – in fact I’m sure we’re going to see overwhelming need.  I’m also sure that it’ll be a great reminder of what’s really important in life. I expect to get more from being here than I’ll ever be able to give back.

With love and grace

Wendy

x

Been thinking about life this week and where I’ve come from…

Realised how much I feel rescued so just want to let you all know…

Grace

Wendy

So on Christmas night my very ‘savvy’ ten year old daughter asked me this question ‘if you could have anything you wanted what would it be?’ I thought for like 5 seconds and replied ‘more time with family and friends!’ Her response ‘Oh… I’d wanna go on ‘deal or no deal’

At the beginning of this year it’s time to think about what we want out of life and start living like we mean it.  I guess in the grand scheme of things it actually is a case of ‘deal or no deal…’

So what about you… if you could have anything what would it be?

Grace

W

Just a quick post to say Happy New Year!

Each New Year gives us the opportunity to make a new start.  In fact, each new day gives us the same opportunity. Many of us make resolutions at the beginning of a new year – I read earlier that what we need are ‘less resolutions and more resolve’. There is a lot of truth in that.  So as you’ll look forward to 2011 I pray that you’ll have all the resolve you need to keep the resolutions you make.

May your 2011 be filled with Peace, Love, Kindness and Joy.

With love

Wendy

A famous quote of Mother Teresa’s is: ‘God doesn’t ask us to do great things.  He asks us to do small things with great love.’

I’ve been reflecting on how success orientated our society is and how this thinking is infecting the Christian community.  It seems that success is all about: size – how big what we’re doing is, celebrity – how many people know who we are, street cred – how cool people think we are, sales – how many albums or books we’ve sold…

I wonder what a small Albanian nun working with lepers, orphans and beggars in back streets of Calcutta would think of our definition of success.  I guess I don’t really need to wonder what she’d think – I know what she’d think…

Wendy

I’ve been reading a book about St Francis of Assisi called Chasing Francis.

I’m usually a really fast reader but I’ve been reading this book slowly so that I can take it all in.  The book is a novel but it combines so much history and so many pertinent questions about life in this post-modern age that it’s really made me think.

At one point in the book Chase the central character meets a Professor of music who makes the statement that ‘we’re all meaning-seekers.’ To paraphrase: People living in the post-modern world are faced with a dilemma.  Our hearts long for ultimate meaning while at the same time our critical minds don’t believe it exists.

This really got my mind going… Clearly Christians find their ultimate meaning in knowing God.  But I’ve been challenged about whether knowing this actually stops us ‘seeking meaning’ enough.  Once we’ve made that initial commitment to God do we approach life and faith a bit too much like Sunday school children who just default to the answer always being Jesus no matter what the question is?   Maybe, just maybe, by doing this we actually miss out on finding the ‘buried treasures of meaning God has hidden in the universe for us to discover.’

Just a thought…

Wendy

Over many years here in the UK we’ve lived with the reality that despite many church streams seeming to grow and encouraging signs of life, overall as the Church in the UK we’ve been in numerical decline.

Today, Christian Research announced that the church is no longer in decline. Catholic church attendance has been steady for five years, Church of England attendance steady for almost a decade (without counting Fresh Expressions) and the Baptist Union is growing. This is great news!

So I guess the question here on in is: how healthy is the church in the UK?

Today, I’ve been with the Spring Harvest Theme Group – this is the core planning group for the event.  One of the discussions we had was: what does a ‘healthy church’ look like? A number of ideas were put forward; this one seemed to resonate with us all.

A healthy church is one where you can see:

• Growth in numbers
• Growth in discipleship
• Growth in relationship
• Growth in community involvement

So, I’d love to know, what do you think a healthy church looks like?

Wendy

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Hey there!

I’ve been thinking about the whole issue of discipleship recently because I’m working on the programming for Youthwork the conference which is happening in November.   I find, that it’s good to ask yourself questions about what it’s all about.  Questions like; what it means to be a follower of Jesus and how I live my faith out.

William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, once said:  ‘The measure of a man or woman’s power can be found in the depth of their surrender.’ Often, even for Christians, God gets crowded out… we make decisions which are more about us than they are about him.

It’s been refreshing to ask myself these questions and to realise again that being a Christian isn’t about make ‘one decision once’ and that being the end of the matter – it’s about making multi decisions every day which reflect my commitment to God and my surrender to him.

Wendy