Too Much Baggage

First published in The Daily Sentinel, Friday, Nov. 14, 2008.


When our children were younger, packing for a trip was more exhausting than the trip itself. We were still living in Texas, and we came to Ohio for Christmas with my wife’s parents. Our kids were something like 6 months old, almost two years old, and five years old. We crammed the van full of diapers, porta-cribs, bottles and formula, clothes, toys and Christmas presents. It took up every open space in the van and a suitcase topper attached to the roof.

After that Christmas, we never attempted to take our young kids so far again. It was simply too much baggage!

Why do we carry around so much baggage? I’m not talking just about when we go on vacation or holiday, but also about what we have all around the house – collections of junk, clutter, and chaos! But even more, I wonder about all the emotional baggage we carry with us no matter where we go. Do you know what I mean? The resentment over something that happened last night – or even last century; the disappointment resulting from unmet expectations, broken promises, or plain bad luck; the fear of change, going into unknown situations and circumstances, and even wondering if the job will still be there next week.

I had to deal with a lot of baggage recently. Actually, I wasn’t sure how to deal with the baggage. By the time you read this column, I will be in Haiti as a member of a mission team. I will be there for eight days, helping to build chicken coops, repairing a school from the ravages of this past hurricane season, visiting with people in their homes, and worshiping together in the local church.
Haiti has been in the news quite a bit recently. Two schools in one week have collapsed, killing more than 80 students and injuring many more. The school I am assisting is not in Port-au-Prince, but in the “boonies” – even for Haiti! Port-au-Prince is the capital of the island nation – the poorer side of Hispaniola; the Dominican Republic occupies the other half of the island.

Haiti has a rich history and a poor present. The original peoples of the island were decimated by Spanish colonists – both directly through slaughter and indirectly through importation of European diseases. The population was reestablished through the importation of Africans as slaves to their European colonialists. Conditions in the island, however, prevented the population from being established through natural propagation. Too many died each year to ever establish a second or third generation of slaves. As a result, African cultures remained more intact as additional waves of slaves were brought into the country.

Perhaps this stronger memory of freedom in Africa helped the slaves of Haiti to overthrow their European rulers in 1804 and establish the second oldest independent republic in the Western Hemisphere, trailing the United States by only about 30 years. But the Haitians seemed not to understand the principals of peaceful transfer of power, and so the nation has experienced continuous warfare, assassinations, military juntas, and dictatorships for most of its past 200 years.

The island’s fertile soils have been exhausted by overuse, the forests cut down for fuel, and now the island nation is especially vulnerable to natural disaster and human mismanagement. I will be in the area near Les Cayes, which was mostly cut off from the rest of the island after the hurricanes this summer. Thousands have died from starvation, polluted water, and lack of medical care. Although only 100 miles from the capital, it takes more than 10 hours to get from Port-au-Prince to Les Cayes by car or truck. You might say Les Cayes is in the “boonies” of all boonies.

Just from my quick history lesson of Haiti, you can see the amount of baggage this nation carries. Somehow, it cannot seem to get past its past and get on to a brighter, more hopeful future. Our economic downturn in America over the last two months is nothing like what the Haitians have dealt with for more than two centuries!

My baggage getting to Haiti is severely limited. I get two suitcases that will be checked, and two carry-ons. But my suitcases aren’t “mine” – they will contain much-needed medical supplies that can only get into the country through bribery and bargaining. Everything that I need – clothes, toiletries, toilet paper, supplies, etc. – have to fit into the carry-ons. And that was not easy to do! I had to let go of a lot of “essentials” in order to take the really essential with me.

When I think about the difference between that family trip for Christmas and my trip to Haiti, I am humbled by what God has done in my life. I now know how little I really need on my own, and how much I rely on God to take care of the rest. I don’t have room for fear, distrust, resentment, and anger on this trip. But I have plenty of room for peace, patience, kindness, goodness, selflessness, and generosity. How about you? What is in your baggage?