Who's in front of me?

A few nights ago, I interviewed a woman who has been working in a makeshift tent hospital in Haiti since the January earthquake. She has performed leg amputations. Delivered babies. Put protruding bones back into bodies. And gotten no more than five hours of sleep per night for two solid months.

I sat on my comfy couch in my warm living room and listened to her share stories. About how the patients at her hospital sleep outside because they’re traumatized. They had been buried in debris, and with recent aftershocks are terrified to sleep under a roof. About how one 10-year-old named Rosemond was pulled out from under his house three days after the quake only to discover that his mom and dad and three siblings had already died. He now vacillates between laughing and playing soccer with kids in the neighborhood--like a normal little boy--and sitting somberly in the corner, alone--like no boy should have to. His 8-year-old buddy at the hospital was amazingly reunited with his parents a few days ago. Rosemond sat in the shadows, quietly watching his friend joyously hug his momma.

I silently dabbed the tears forming in my eyes. As she told me about her average day, I couldn’t help but feel a little guilty. What am I doing for the good of humanity? What difference, really, am I making sitting in my office working on a computer? While she’s fixing a skull fracture, I’m running on a treadmill at the gym!?

An overwhelming sense of responsibility and guilt bubbled up inside of me. And it's happened before. It happened after I returned from planting gardens in South Africa for 10 days. It happened when I built homes in poverty-stricken Mexico for a weekend. I felt so bad for having so much and doing so little. I started feeling guilty about the simplest luxuries. Why do I get toothpaste when so many others can’t even get water? Why do I get to go to five different shoe stores to pick out the “perfect” boots, when so many others don’t have anything on their feet? I should be somewhere doing something helping lots of people.

And yet, logically, I know it can’t work. We can’t all drop what we’re doing and go help people in Haiti forever. In fact, we’d probably make things worse there!

At the end of the conversation, I asked my interviewee why she’s doing what she’s doing--why she intends to spend another month far from home, tending to others’ physical needs. After a few moments of silence, she said that being there right now is extremely overwhelming. There are too many people with too many needs, but she reminds herself each day that Jesus was not about quantity. He was about quality. He was about helping the one person in front of him at any given time.

I sat up a little straighter. That’s right. We are the hands and feet of Christ. And we can’t all be in the same place at the same time doing the same thing. Sometimes I think I should put those blinders on...the kind that horses wear? Or one of those silly white megaphone-looking things that dogs where. I can sometimes get so overwhelmed by the enormous size and quantity of humanity's problems that I am blind to the ways I can truly make a difference. Instead, I feel guilty for the ways I can't make a difference.

So, the question is: who’s in front of me? Right now. Right here. How can I help him or her--even if it means only getting five hours of sleep?