Haiti Bible Institute 2011.04: Certain Uncertainty

I enjoy home and all the craziness that goes with it, but I have definitely noticed how much more time I have here to just sit and think. Example: We were without power all night long and into this afternoon, so I was conserving my laptop battery. I got to brewing on the common US philosophy about what to do with resources. We say, “Spend it when you get it because you can always get more.” At home I don’t have to think about shutting the laptop lid before I leave the room.

I know that not everyone fits these descriptions, but the third world mentality seems different. They say, “Make the most of what you have, for life is uncertain.” You never know when the power will go off, when your job will end or when the building will collapse on you. This is not so much a lesson about conservation as it is a lesson about gratefulness and management of blessings.

On the other hand, sometimes the quiet gets shattered. In the middle of the night I was awakened by sirens and the sound of a speeding emergency vehicle. Then I fell back into a blissfully ignorant sleep. This morning I learned that there was gunfire in the neighborhood (Jim Bearss speculates a nine millimeter) not long before the sirens. I guess I was sleeping too soundly for that. This surprised me because I thought we were very much removed from the rough part of town. I’ll just assume that someone couldn’t sleep and decided to get up and do some target practice in his yard. Just the same, the lesson learned is one about the uncertainty of life in a sin-cursed world:
Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.” Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away. James 4:13-14

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