I saw Ben first. It had been two years since our last big HOPE event, but Ben was among the first guests I welcomed to our donor gathering in Nashville earlier this fall. My heart lifted.
This event is really happening.
Until our guests arrive or we walk into a friend’s front door or we sit down at the restaurant booth, we plan with all our fingers crossed. This is an age of remarkably fragile expectations. We’ve bought flights and subsequently canceled them. We’ve bailed on gatherings because of runny noses, delinquent test results, or worse.
We’ve learned to live with loosely held plans and guarded anticipation. I mostly hate it. But I also wonder if it is exactly what we need. I think it’s what I need.
If there’s any place in the world familiar with unpredictability it is Haiti. The resilient people of this beautiful country understand how to navigate unreliability.
Dr. Lesly Jules leads HOPE’s work in Haiti, by many measures the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. Throughout the country, HOPE serves over 16,000 families through church-based savings groups.
“Crisis and instability are not new for the families HOPE serves,” Lesly shared with us. “The pandemic was not the first disruption—and it won’t be the last.”
Lesly shared this late last year. And then 2021 hit. In July, assassins murdered Haiti’s president. Violence and chaos hit the streets afterward and continued throughout the year. And just one month later, a significant earthquake hit the south, leaving an already vulnerable country weary of being weary.
The earthquake disappeared from the news quickly, but the impact on Haiti remains painful. In the most fatal crisis to ever strike the HOPE network over our 24-year history, we mourned the tragic loss of 71 savings group members. Thousands more lost the lives of their children, friends, and family members.
For Haiti in 2021, unpredictability reigns.
When Mary and Joseph welcomed Jesus into the stable, the world looked much more like the unreliable reality in Haiti than it did my world prior to 2019. We know enough about their lives to know Mary and Joseph shared far more in common with the families HOPE serves in Haiti than my family. They understood vulnerability in ways we can only just glimpse.
“The disappointment, brokenness, suffering, and pain that characterize life in this present world is held in dynamic tension with the promise of future glory that is yet to come,” writes Fleming Rutledge. “In that Advent tension, the church lives its life.”
I don’t get how Mary and Joseph retained their sanity amid the personal and societal turmoil they encountered as outcasts living on the brink of a forthcoming genocide. But somehow, they managed to hold on even when everything around them fell apart. When I clamor to find my bearings, I find myself looking to Haiti and to Bethlehem to find a hope that does not make stability a prerequisite.