After a decade of unprecedented disasters in America, we can learn a lot about dealing with tough times from a tiny nation with nothing.
Only 700 miles from Florida, but a universe away, 20-foot-deep-ditches are overflowing with tens of thousands of bodies. Images of battered and bruised school girls embracing the lifeless bodies of classmates, mothers falling to their knees and crying out to the heavens, and hospitals, schools, churches and any building left standing filled with the critically injured literally dying for help fill the airwaves, the Internet and the minds and hearts of millions all over of the world.
With the death toll nearing 200,000, the situation in Haiti will soon outgrow the word catastrophe and enter the sphere of apocalypse. Yet for Haiti this isn’t a totally new experience. In 2004, a torrential rain drowned 2,000 people. Only a few months later, Hurricane Jeanne killed 1,900 more and left hundreds of thousands homeless. In 2008 three tropical storms killed close to 800.
However, the 7.0 earthquake that hit last month has clearly been the largest catastrophe Haiti has endured since the 1700s. With little to no infrastructure, the majority of Haitian housing has been demolished, leaving entire families and groups of families living in tents. The injuries have rippled into a cascade of Illness and disease. The Red Cross estimates that if more relief doesn’t come quickly, the death toll could top 250,000. Add to all that a lack of proper sanitation, and an avalanche of yet to be discovered problems threaten to overwhelm Haiti.
A helping hand
While Americans scramble to support their hemispheric neighbors, as well they should, I wonder if we truly appreciate exactly what our inspiring outpouring of love and support can teach us about our own problems.
Our government has rightly dedicated hundreds of millions of dollars to this tiny island nation neighbor. Everyday Americans have pledged hundreds of millions more. We are all calling into telephone banks manned by celebrities who have millions of disposable dollars, and we are doing so from the comfort of our homes on our fully functional cell phones — giving money that, despite our economic woes, we can afford to give. The people of Haiti on the other hand have none of those luxuries or choices right now.
Haiti is the definition of desperation. This is the real meaning of hard times. And yet the Haitians go on — to endure, to persevere, to live.
It is not the end for Haiti, but a new beginning. And it is never the end for any of us, as long as we are living and breathing with the breath and inspiration of the Lord. Isn’t that the message of Job — the good news of our Lord — and the message of Psalms? “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.”
Maybe Haiti is our wake up call to stop living in a delusory world where we strive for comfort and ease — instead choosing to cherish the struggle that is life lest we be doomed to eternal ingratitude.
We are all in this together — life, that is — and nobody gets out alive. It’s what we do, why we do it, and how we do it while we are here that counts. Help Haiti, help your neighbors, help your family and friends, and stop wasting time worrying about how much you have or don’t have. After all, I’m pretty sure none of you out there are worse off than our Haitian neighbors.
–Chris Benguhe will donate half of his profits from all copies of “Overcoming Life’s 7 Common Tragedies: Opportunities for Discovering God” sold on Amazon.com through Easter 2010 to Haiti relief.
Last week a teenage boy stuck a gun to my head. The peach fuzz on his face was still not mature enough to make a real beard, but the gun was all too real.
As I stared down the shiny black, cold-steel barrel of the gun, I wasn’t as scared as I was shocked — that a boy this young could be so desperate and so willing to destroy life.
It was just after dusk, when I parked my car at the edge of the parking lot at a local restaurant in Central Phoenix, only a few blocks from my home.
I emerged from the car and only made it a few steps before a young, wiry youth, donning a black-hooded sweatshirt pounced on me, pointing a small caliber gun in my face and screaming at me.
I had just given a teen talk at a local church a few nights earlier, and as strange as it sounds, the first thing that popped into my head was that he reminded me of one of those kids. Was this for real? Could this be some badly conceived prank? But the gun was no joke, and as I hesitated he became more irate.
I pulled a wad of five singles from my wallet and threw them at him. The flying cash distracted him long enough for me to make it into the restaurant and call the police.
Within minutes the place was swarming with cops, and half an hour later they had three suspects in custody down the street.
As a police cruiser drove me a few blocks away to where they were being held, I reflected on the whole event for the first time. I wasn’t as angry as I was sad. As I thought about the years of jail time he would receive for armed robbery, I wanted to sit this foolish boy down and drum into his brain exactly what he had done, and what he jeopardized.
What might have been
I thought about my mother who recently had a stroke and depends on me. I thought about my friends and the rest of my family who would be so extraordinarily traumatized by the event if this kid would have shot me.
I thought about his family and what they would lose if I were armed and shot him.
I thought about all the people this young man could help in the future.
I thought about the children I would never have, he would never have and all the ways the world would be deprived of one or both of us.
I know how much I have to offer; he obviously had no idea how much he could give, and he was willing to throw both of our lives away for a few dollars.
I wanted to tell him all of that and more as we neared the sea of flashing lights sitting atop the caravan of cop cars surrounding the suspects. The cruiser stopped 20 feet away, and three suspects were dragged from the back of an SUV and paraded in front of the headlights. None of them were him.
My heart sank a little. I could never look this misled youth in the eye and tell him why what he did was so insane!
But I am still here to help and to make a difference. And maybe there still is a way to get to him, by telling you to share this story with every young man and woman you know, so that they never make the same stupid mistake.
So that maybe eventually every one of them will know what he didn’t — that God created us to live, to let live, and to revel in the love that surrounds us no matter how much we have or don’t have everything we want. And that blessed mission is priceless.
DON’T JUST FIND A JOB – FIND YOUR CALLING!
Have you lost your job? Are you hurting financially, struggling to get back in the game? You are not alone; the unemployment rate is skyrocketing, especially in places like Michigan.
But your job loss could be the ultimate opportunity to find your true purpose. And that might not just help YOU to find a new job but a whole new career and greater happiness than you have ever known by finding out what society needs and ultimately finding God’s mission for you.
Every one of us has something the world needs, and by learning how to share that gift with the world for all the right reasons, we are rewarded with all the things that we need.
That’s actually at the heart of capitalism, the most moral economic system on earth.
God gave you a special gift that nobody can take away from you, and when you use it to contribute to the world, the world rewards you. Finding your mission is finding the job or career that will allow you to do that.
But in a confusing and failing economic environment the true meaning and value of work, social responsibility and YOU has become muddled, if not completely lost. Too much government regulation on one end and too much corporate greed and malfeasance on the other end has caused the whole system to go haywire. That is not your fault.
Yet, your desire and ability to reach out to and contribute to the world is a divinely inspired asset that can and will still lead you to long-term and stable career success once you engage it. Because God gave every one of us something the world needed, and our jobs are how we offer that gift and are rewarded by society for it?
Finding your mission is finding the job or career that will allow you to do that. In other words, your economic value is assigned by God, and it is not rooted in how much you earn, but in HOW and WHY you earn.
This new perspective enables and inspires you to reach out to others to love and respect and to be loved and respected as an integral part of the human community, and finally to transform that whole life idea into a career strategy that will help you find and succeed at a new job.
Want to read more. Find out how to turn your job problems, and all your other troubles into opportunities to revitalize your life in Chris Benguhe’s new book, “Overcoming Life’s 7 Common Tragedies: Opportunities for Discovering God,” available here on this website or at Amazon.com.
Author and Columnist Chris Benguhe will be kicking off his W.O.R.K (Wealth Originated from Responsibility and Kindness) program at churches from coast to coast this fall. If you are interested in bringing Mr. Benguhe and his seminar to your church or other organization, you may contact him at cbenguhe@yahoo.com.
Something amazing is happening all around us. As one of the worst economic downturns in history struck this nation last year, the nation has responded not by crumbling under the strain, but by downsizing, reprioritizing and reassessing their values. The results – a nation that saves more, spends less on things they don’t need, while remarkably has continued to give to charity.
That’s amazing and almost too hard to believe, if it weren’t true. And what it says about human nature is nothing less than extraordinary.
Here are the facts. Amidst an economy that saw housing values in many areas drop in half, an unemployment rate that nearly doubled and 54% of human services charities report a rise in human services requests, it was no doubt that people are hurting. We have all felt the hit in one way shape or form.
Yet look at some of these surprising effects.
The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index – a Gallup poll that rates how Americans feel about the quality of their lives actually went up since last June.
Another Gallup poll shows that Americans have not only cut back on their expenses because of these tough times, something that you would obviously expect, but that that they have come to terms with their new budgets and aren’t that worried anymore. In other words, they have changed their expectations of what they want and they need.
The study showed that 71% saying they are cutting back on their spending and 88% saying they are watching their spending very closely.
But the result of that is that 78% of Americans now say they have enough money to satisfy their basic needs.
That brings up two points in my slightly twisted reality; one is that the situation is not quite as dire as some would have us believe. But secondly, that Americans have a pretty amazing ability to adapt, especially when they realize what and who is important in their lives. And this crisis has apparently helped us to do that.
And that brings me to my third amazing realization – giving.
Despite all the hardships that occurred over the last year, the total amount of charitable giving in the United States exceeded $300 billion for the second year in a row in 2008, according to Giving USA 2009. Donations reached an estimated $307.65 billion in 2008.
Now admittedly and significantly that was a 2 percent drop over 2007, but considering that the economic climate was reduced by a whole lot more, that’s pretty amazing reorganizing and reprioritizing. A caveat to that number is that religious donations soared to $106.89 billion – an increase of an estimated 5.5 percent.
Now let me throw in one more little interesting study for good measure The latest Gallup Values and Beliefs Poll, conducted annually each May, this year found the number of people who say that the moral values of America are getting better to have increased – in fact it doubled since the beginning of the year.
Christ once said that money was the root to all evil. Discussions of the meaning of that phrase about in theological circles, but generally it is believed to mean that the vicious and unrestrained pursuit of money at all costs lead down the primrose path.
So maybe an economy that forces us to slow down in that pursuit and reevaluat what we ant and need isn’t such a bad thing.
That doenst mean that we shouldn’t keep trying to improve, but that maybe fixing our economy isn’t as necessary as fixing our values.
After all if we all can whether this much of an economic hit and still be ok, maybe are perceptions of what we needed weren’t so clear in the first place.
But maybe they will be a whole lot clearer because of it.
By the time you read this, the New Year will have already begun, which means it’s time to start fresh with a new attitude and a new plan.
With just about every single pundit telling you how bad things are, how about a quick look at what didn’t go wrong?
Well, first we dodged a few bullets this hurricane season. Though we saw the fourth most active hurricane season on record, the United States escaped with far less damage and deaths than could have been, say for instance if Hurricane Ike had made landfall as a Category 4 storm instead of a Category 2.
And knock on wood, we still have not suffered another terror attack on U.S. soil since 2001. Regardless of what you think about our government or the current administration, somebody was working pretty hard to protect us. All those individuals deserve a hand, and thank God for them.
Speaking of keeping us safe, the crime rate went down last year in the United States. Last September, the FBI’s Crime in the United States report showed a decline in crimes in almost every category.
On the health care front, the rates of almost every disease have dropped dramatically in America over the last several decades, according to a report released in June 2008.
The American Heart Association reported coronary heart disease and stroke age-adjusted death rates are down by 25.8 percent and 24.4 percent, respectively, in the last decade. In fact, their 2010 strategic goal for reducing deaths from coronary heart disease has already been achieved.
Last year, the American Cancer Society informed us that the death rate from lung, colorectal, prostate, breast and other cancer types all fell. The cancer death rate for men has fallen by 18.4 percent since 1990 and for women has fallen by 10.5 percent since 1991.
Yes, cancer is still the second leading cause of death in the United States, right behind heart disease, so we all need to keep working on both of these societal issues. But those figures aren’t flukes; they are the result of a lot of hard work by dedicated Americans in the health care fields, the scientific community, in academia and government as well as everyday Americans trying harder to take care of themselves so they can live longer, more fruitful and productive lives for their loved ones, for society and for themselves.
None of that is accidental either. We care about our children, and it shows. They care too about living a better life. Do we have more work to do letting our children know about the value and the importance of their lives? You betcha! But things are getting better, not worse.
Ultimately, what did go really wrong this year came down to money — the way people use it, and how a bunch of it disappeared from our bank accounts. For many of us it was downright disheartening. For others it was truly a catastrophe.
This is a time for those of us who can still pay the bills to realize we have been spared this year from so many other catastrophes, that maybe we should be pretty grateful, and maybe we should reach out a little bit more to help because of that.
What do greedy union bosses and Wall Street tycoons have in common? Could it be Old Scratch – the guy with the horns and the bifurcated tail?
Greedy Union bosses refusing to accept salary modifications bring down the auto bailout in the United States Senate on the same day a long time Wall Street powerbroker is arrested after confessing to a massive fraud scheme that will cost investors $50 million bucks! Who is behind all of this? As former SNL cutup Dana Carvey would say, “Could it be – Satan?”
OK, so maybe we don’t have actual photographs of Satan lurking in the shadows, but America cannot extricate itself from its overwhelming economic crisis until it accepts this is not just an economic problem, nor is it a regulatory problem, nor even a problem with too little or too much government – it’s an ethical problem. And we need an ethical policy to get us back on track?
Over the course of the last several decades we have seen Wall Street artificially inflate he market, and corporate executives break the law and the trust of their stockholders in order to maximize personal wealth regardless of the effects on thousands of stockholders. We have watched politicians, banks, and mortgage companies promote and protect fraud and deceit in order to boost their bottom line in the short run.
We have seen everyday people lie about income and make promises to pay that many knew were illegitimate, so they could have more than they could afford or need. Add to that a bunch of self-motivated oil speculators who drove the price of oil through the roof until a sabotaged economy brought it down, and a nation of people seemingly obsessed with having more, bigger and better stuff.
Finally, now we have Wall Street financiers and Big Business bosses looking for government bailout packages, unions refusing to negotiate wages for the good of ALL the employees and the nation, and everyday folks all looking for tax breaks and what their country can do for them, instead of the other way around. (Then there is that little deal over in Illinois where a sitting governor tried to sell our incoming president’s senate seat to the highest bidder.)
What do all these things have in common? They are all SELFISH AND IMMORAL!
This is a wake up call to realize that we cannot find success and prosperity through self-centered indulgence. That’s not how America was built. But somewhere along the line, some crazy idiot convinced a bunch of modern Americans that capitalism was based on greed and self-service.
Not so says the founder of capitalism, Adam Smith. Most unethical opportunists today point to Smith’s claims in his famous “Wealth of Nations” that self-interests alone are what make capitalism work. But Smith wrote another book that most people have not read. In his “Theory of Moral Sentiments,” he clarifies his theory of capitalism arguing that sympathy for others is a prerequisite for success both in the individual and in society.
Smith categorically disapproves of selfishness as inappropriate, if not immoral. He explains that true “self-interest” includes the interest of the rest of society, since the social acceptance, status, and support of all affects the interests of the individual that is a member of that society. He argues only a society which values social justice achieved through community and moral obligations can achieve prosperity.
So unless we are going to return to the principles of community responsibility, social integrity and the work ethic that worked once upon a time to make America great, we might as well sell the shop and move back to the old country!
But how on earth can we find those principles again? Religion may be the saving grace that gives all of us — even the non-religious — the wisdom and fortitude to find our way amidst a barrage of national and global challenges because religion is where we got it in the first place.
Since the United States of America was founded on the divinely ordained innate value of humanity and our responsibility to respect it, as derived from the Judeo Christian Bible— old-time religion might be what we are looking for. It’s a pretty good start for anyone looking for some pointers on doing the “right” thing.
But if religion is not your thing, then you better find some other absolute, moral gyroscope that centers your purpose and being in something other than yourself, one that is not relativistic, and that will allow all of us as a nation to make very real economic, political and possibly mortal sacrifices for the good of others.
Otherwise – Satan is ready and willing to be our next Chairman of the Federal Reserve!
