All The Way

This week I am headed to New Orleans to help with the rehabilitation of another home in the 9th Ward. This is my second year of going down to work on a house. The report I heard recently was that 80 percent of the people were still not back in their homes. This is five years since Katrina hit that community. I am not sure that the 80 percent figure is true for all of New Orleans. But I do know that five years after the storm there is still an amazing amount of work that needs to be done. The Federal Aid has been slow finding its way to help. I know of another group of people who go every year to help along the Mississippi coast with rebuilding. Recovery takes a long time and it is hard to stay with it to the end.

The work of restoring New Orleans and the time it takes makes the thought of rebuilding Haiti seem almost impossible. In many ways the destruction has been so much worse or different. The leadership of the country rivals the leadership in New Orleans for incompetence. The number of people affected seems so much greater and the physical damage to people has been much more severe. If we are still five years and working on New Orleans, it is hard to imagine how many years work will be needed to done to rebuild Haiti. One has to wonder if the international community has the will and the commitment to stay with the effort until the work is done.

It seems to me that there is a ambiguous attitude towards that kind of total commitment within our culture. We do have slogans like "Quitters never win, and winners never quit." but I also know there is the attitude, "If at first you don't succeed, quit before you make a fool of yourself." A preschool teacher told me that that was the biggest change she had seen in children in her thirty years. When she began teaching, if she gave a child a puzzle to work, they worked at it until they got it done. When she retired thirty years later, the child would try a couple of solutions and then quit and wait for the teacher to show her.

Certainly our divorce rate has something to suggest about our attitude towards commitment and working all things to the end.
Politicians present interesting studies as so few things get accomplished or finished that it is hard to tell whether any of them see an issue through to the end. I think that was the last temptation given to Jesus: to give up the fight, to say that he had made a good effort, and it had not worked and he could just go into retirement and live with Mary and raise a family. But as he said "It is finished" he had stayed with it to the end.

The rebuilding of New Orleans is not finished, but it has dropped off the major radar of work that needs to be done. The rebuilding of Haiti is now being talked about and people are commenting about how long that work will have to take and whether or not we have the commitment to see it through. There is within the Christian story a thread that speaks of a love that has that kind of tenacity.