In the death of Maya Angelou we lost so much.

We lost a woman who used her voice for speak for those without a voice. We lost a woman who was incredibly wise and yet spoke with simple clarity. We lost a woman who experienced pain and knew how to overcome it.

But more than all that we lost a woman who to the very core of her being epitomized courage.

Maya Angelou once said that ‘Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage.’

Recently I’ve been struck about how important and necessary courage is. We don’t often talk about it but many people have to be courageous every day of their lives.

It takes courage to take a stand and speak out when others remain silent. It takes courage to encounter rejection and not become cynical. It takes courage to live selflessly when others are selfishly ambitious.  It takes courage to be treated badly and not seek revenge. It takes courage to go on when life has knocked you down.

But, the more I’ve thought about Maya Angelou, the more I’ve realised at the core of this amazing women was not only courage but also hope.

Maya experienced a world that was brutal and unjust. As a child she was subjected the most terrible experience – being raped by someone she should have been able to trust. Then watching that man be killed and believing it to be her fault she was mute for almost five years.

But despite this – and many other terrible experiences – through her writing, teaching, activism and art she showed us how to live life infused with hope. To live a life that believed for better.

Through her writing she spoke into being a world that was better than the one we often experience. She enabled us to dream for a better tomorrow than the world we experience today. Through her own example of fighting against the odds, she gave us the courage and hope that we too could overcome all that life throws at us.

So embrace hope and courage. And know to the very core of your being that they are the ‘fuel’ for a life well lived.

RIP Maya Angelou you taught us all so much.

The post A TRIBUTE: COURAGEOUS TO THE CORE first appeared on Wendy Beech-Ward.

I’ve discovered that people who live in comfort sometimes say the dumbest things because their comfort robs them of their ability to care.

I absolutely hate the phrase ‘compassion fatigue’ and I always have. And today I hate it with more passion than I ever have. It seems to me that ‘compassion fatigue’ is a phrase which gets used by comfortable people who live in comfortable places with comfortable lives. Compassion fatigue is by definition a luxury.

Yesterday, I met a church leader who leads a church of 7,000 people. After talking to him for a while I about his amazing vision for his church I asked him: ‘what is your biggest personal challenge as a Christian in Haiti?’  His answer was: ‘my biggest challenge is that the need just keeps coming.  And the more need you meet the need the more it just keeps coming.’ Was he a candidate for compassion fatigue? Yes. Did he have compassion fatigue? Absolutely not, because he doesn’t have the luxury of that choice.

Today we’ve spent the day with the church we might be working with to fund a building so they can run a Child Survival Programme (CSP). We took Nellie the Compassion ‘big blue elephant’ to their school (we’ve discovered that most schools in Haiti are in churches). At the school we met 200 amazing, fun and happy children – we played with the elephant and some with balloons with them. The joy on their faces was priceless.

Later, we stopped to film some of the Bible readings we’ll be looking at Spring Harvest. Three young boys joined our team for an hour. Initially they were full of bravado as only teenagers can be. As they began to trust us they began to tell us their stories.

Each had lost their parents in the earthquake, each had nowhere to live, each of them had nobody who cared about them. So they stuck together – three boys with nothing and nobody so they look after each other because they know its the only way they’ll survive.

Someone once said that ‘your perspective  is shaped by what you see when you first open your curtains in the morning.’ I don’t know what you see when you open the curtains in the morning – I see a leafy street and the school opposite my house. I don’t see 600,000 people living in tents, I don’t see street children, I don’t see people scratching a living by selling stuff on the streets, I don’t see parents robbed of all their hopes and dreams, I don’t see children orphaned by an earthquake begging for food.  I don’t see any of that.

Compassion fatigue says that ‘the needs are so great, and the little I can do won’t make a difference so I won’t even try.’ It’s a lie, an excuse and a choice that only comfortable people can make. Nobody I’ve met in Haiti has that choice or even if they did would make that choice – not the Compassion team, not the church leaders and definitely not three young street boys with nobody and nothing who’ve chosen to help their friends.

So if these people can find a place in their hearts to reach out and help, why can’t we? Because choice is a luxury only the comfortable have.

Stuff to think about…

Do ever think ‘the needs are so great, and the little I can do won’t make a difference so I won’t even try’?

If you do, what can you do to shake it off?

What is the biggest personal challenge to you being a Christian and a leader?

The post CHOICE IS A LUXURY (HAITI #3) first appeared on Wendy Beech-Ward.

Welcome to Haiti read the sign at the airport. Once through customs and immigration we joined a bustling mass of people. It’d be easy to think that they were normal travellers but after listening to their conversations it turned out that pretty much everyone on the plane was here to see how they could help the Haitian people rebuild their country.  Realising that there is such a desire to help was inspiring.

As most of you reading this know, every year at Spring Harvest we take up an offering and give this money away to charities doing amazing work. In 2012 we’ve called our offering ‘No Ceiling to Hope’ and we’ve come to Haiti to find out if there is a church we can partner with to help them ‘demonstrate the love of God to the most needy in their community.’ Given all I saw yesterday I’m totally confident that we’ll find loads of people we can partner with.

We’re really grateful to our friends at Compassion for enabling me, Abby Guinness, Krish Kandiah, Bekah Legg and Damian Wharton to come here on behalf of the Spring Harvest community.  We’ve brought a film crew with us from OH TV to document our experiences – the people we meet, the places we visit and the impact the church is having – also with us are our friends Ian Hamilton and Steve Bunn from Compassion UK.

We arrived in Haiti yesterday and spent the day travelling and orientating ourselves to the people and the places we’re going to visit. And I have to say it was totally overwhelming (a word I think I’ll be using a lot this week). To be lifted out of your regular life and dropped into a place so different from your own life creates a weird sense of alternative reality. Almost every experience is different to what I see at home – instead of empty leafy streets I saw masses of people because in Haiti 85% of adults are unemployed, instead of houses I saw tents, instead of people living in comfort I saw people making the best of life under terrible conditions.  It was overwhelming.

We went out for food to a Chinese restaurant. We had a great time talking about our hopes and dreams for the trip.  I’m really passionate that the people we meet know that we don’t come with any other agenda than to serve them and what God is doing through them. I’m not even sure whether I want to use the phrase ‘help them’ – which of course we do but the phrase doesn’t sit well with me…

When we came out of the restaurant we faced what we hadn’t seen when we drove up – we saw the tent village. The picture at the top of this blog post is the photo I took of it.  Between us and them was a road – 18 feet separated us.  18 feet between our side where we eat great food and can keep asking for more just because we can and their side where they eat nothing or our leftovers. 18 feet isn’t much – yesterday it felt like an ocean.

For me personally I guess this trip is about finding out how we navigate all the roads we discover that feel like an oceans.  In doing that, I’m sure we’ll find our place in the bigger story of what God is doing in the world.

Stuff to think about…

Have you ever been in a situation where the road between you and others felt like an ocean?

If you have, what did you do to navigate it?

[P.s.  Compassion are helping us identify a church we can work with to fund them building some infrastructure to host a Child Survival Programme.  There is a real problem in Haiti with infant mortality basically lots of children aren’t surviving their early years and churches don’t have the buildings they need to run a programmes in. Of course we’ll be asking questions about how the money we give can be used most effectively, and, as always, we’ll do all the necessary checks on financial integrity.]

The post THE ROAD BETWEEN US (HAITI #2) first appeared on Wendy Beech-Ward.

I’m sitting on the plane and musing about what the next few days might bring. I’m en-route to Haiti to find a church we can work as part of the Spring Harvest offering. Seems a simple enough thing to do but it’s only now I’m on the plane that I’ve started to think about what we’re going to see, experience and feel when we’re in Haiti.

I’ve been on trips like this before. I was in Bosnia and Croatia during the war – I met people so poor that they had resorted to eating grass, people who’d been tortured, others had seen horrific things happen to their family and friends – all of them people who’d lost everything both materially and emotionally because of the war. Somehow I think what I’m about to see will be different. Bosnia needed help because a war had ravaged the country. Haiti needs help because an earthquake ravaged the country.

We’ve called this offering ‘No Ceiling to Hope’ – we totally believe there isn’t a ceiling to hope whether you’re in a war zone or in a place of extreme poverty.  God’s love demonstrated through acts of kindness, grace and compassion can ‘break every chain’ – emotional, spiritual or physical – which seek to ensnare us.

As Spring Harvest, we also totally believe that ‘the Church is God’s hope for the world’. That wherever we are, whatever our context – God calls his people to reach out in love and grace to those around them whether they’re in the church or totally outside it. One of the things I’m most looking forward to about this trip is seeing the love of God made real through the corporate Church and through individual Christians in Haiti. I’m sure their lives will be incredibly challenging.

I’m excited and a bit scared about what I’m about to experience… I know we’ll see plenty of need – in fact I’m sure we’re going to see overwhelming need. I’m also sure that it’ll be a great reminder of what’s really important in life. I expect to get more from being here than I’ll ever be able to give back.

Stuff to think about…

How is your church being ‘the hope of the world’ in your community?

What part have you played in being bringing hope to others?

The post IS THERE A CEILING TO HOPE? (HAITI #1) first appeared on Wendy Beech-Ward.