Perspective

Sam came home from school today with two frowns in his backpack - one on incomplete homework and the second on a note from one of his "specials" teachers who dismissed him from class because he was misbehaving. After my lecture about how important his "specials" classes are, I made him finish the incomplete homework.

"This is the worst day EVER!" he told me, clenching his teeth, dragging his feet.

"You want to hear worst day ever," I told him. "Then come here." I dragged him to my computer and pulled up cnn.com.

"This is Haiti. It is one of the poorest, most hopeless countries on Earth. The people who live there have next to nothing. Little food, little clean drinking water. Not much more than the clothes on their backs. And yesterday, there was an earthquake in Haiti. Tens of thousands of people died."

I clicked through a slideshow of photos, nothing too graphic, except for one, dozens of bodies in a makeshift morgue in the street.

"Are they sleeping in the streets?" Sam asked.

"No Sam. Those people are dead. So many people died they don't have anywhere to put the bodies."

And whether it was wise or not, I told him, "So Sam, the next time we think we've had a bad day because we burned dinner or we broke a toy, maybe we should think about these people. Because they had very little and now they have even less."

And it's true. Woe is me and my boring commute, my expensive health care, my dirty car or piles of laundry. One victim in the morgue photo was holding an infant. An infant. We look at the photos and cry and pray and make our donations and most of us (save those in 9/11 or Katrina) have not lost our families, our churches, our schools, our infrastructure.

I pray we never do. And I pray that the money and aid Haiti is receiving will make a difference.