By Guest Blogger Sean Bell
The same earthquake hitting any ‘modern’ city would not have done nearly the damage. And those buildings that did fall down would be quickly picked up and searched by advanced heavy duty equipment and hospitals would have received the wounded quickly.
I was reflecting on some friends of mine who are on a Panama cruise right now… I was puzzling over what it must be like to be in the lap of luxury, well fed on a boat, trying to have a relaxing and good time, while all hell has broken loose just a few miles away in Haiti.
But then… this is just a microcosm of the reality of our nation standing rich next to the world of suffering and pain and death and malnourishment that is just a few thousand miles away everyday.
It is wonderful the outpouring of money and concern I see. This is the same way we treat medicine… wait till there is a major problem and then fix the symptoms without getting to the root.
But what if we took our “mission for others” to mean that we had to make sure every place in the world were prepared for such eventualities. Primary Economic and Infrastructure care instead of treating the symptoms when the major natural disaster hits.
Sean
PT
What if...? 
I was watching The Daily Show last night (Jan 18), and the guest author that Jon Stewart had on the show was talking about economic recovery in the US. And he said that since 1776 the US (and while I usually think the two countries are different, in this case I think Canada is likely the same) has not had any sort of plan or direction or goal. The country has just existed and for the most part has been throwing money at problems for nearly 250 years. So the response to the crisis in Haiti is not surprising, where was all the compassion when most of these same poeple were living in poverty, facing disease and starvation?
Its also no wonder that the church finds it so difficult to communicate vision and direction, when our society seems to operate without vision or direction also.
In these liminal moments, I wonder if perhaps the church has a greater opportunity to show the way?
While watching these relief efforts, and contemplating the fracturedness of the body of Christ, I pondered something…What if the Lutheran World Relief and the PWRDF (Anglican), the United M&S merged together into one streamlined relief agency…but taking it one step further to truly become a global impact, what if these agencies then merged with the Red Cross or World Vision to truly pool resources to help those in need?
Hmm…