Beauty on the Backroads

Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns

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News travels fast (and then what?)

We wake up to the news that an earthquake has devastated Nepal.

And my day begins with a burdened feeling for people I don’t even know. I search Twitter for news. For photos. I scan Facebook for news about people I know who live/work/travel in the area. I am hungry for information and in the information age, news comes as quickly as fast food through a drive-up window.

Quick. Now. Instant. I want to know everything and I want to know it now.

On the one hand, it’s a blessing. Tragedy strikes and we can know within hours if loved ones, friends, acquaintances are safe. We can mourn in real time with those who are suffering. We are connected across oceans in ways that still astound me.

News travels fast.

Pavan Trikutam | Creative Commons | via unsplash

Pavan Trikutam | Creative Commons | via unsplash

Sometimes, though, it’s a curse. News travels so fast that it’s often just as quickly forgotten.

Today, we are focused on Nepal. And maybe tomorrow we will be, too.

But our attention will fade long before the work is done. We will move on and those who have suffered loss will remain in their pain.

We swear we’ll never forget but we do. All the time.

Remember Ebola? There are people in Liberia and other West African nations who have daily been unable to forget because they are on the ground in the midst of the outbreak, doing the work.

Or what about the university attacks in Kenya?

Or how about Hurricane Sandy? Or the Midwestern tornado that leveled an Illinois town called Fairdale? Or any other countless disasters that wreck lives on any given day?

We can’t remember them all. We’re human, aren’t we? And the world is so messed up that bad news seems to be the only news, and who needs that to drag them down day after day? Right?

I confess: it’s easier to turn off the TV, or not watch the news in the first place, or scroll past the Tweets or Facebook posts about tragedy, or scan them with a “not-another-one” attitude. I do it all the time.

I’m not proud of that.

When I was a newspaper reporter, the pressure was high to publish breaking news and follow up on that news in the days after. But every day was something new and sometimes one tragedy trumped another. We’d make it to the one-year anniversary of an event and I’d think, “Has it been a year already?”

News travels fast and time passes quickly and life goes on.

But what if it’s your tragedy?

We can blame the media, but it’s not really their fault. If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s mine. (And yours. But I can only deal with my fault. You’ll have to deal with yours.)

As I scrolled through Twitter today, looking at pictures from Nepal, I wondered about the role of the photographers. I questioned the sanity of people tweeting while running from an avalanche on Everest. I even wondered if I should believe everything I read on the Internet.

When news travels fast, it’s not always accurate, at least not at first, but there are circumstances where some news is better than no news, even if it’s wrong. (The journalist inside me is screaming “NO” at that statement.)

It is good for us to see that people are huddling in tents in Kathmandu as night falls. And it’s good for us to be reminded that the water supply is dwindling. And it is right that we know that the death toll is climbing. Because the more we know, the more we’ll connect, and the longer we’ll remember.

At least, I hope so.

We want to help, I think. Most of us do, anyway. So we send money. We pray. Or if it’s a closer-to-home tragedy, maybe we bring food. Send a card. Take a team to help.

Maybe you respond to suffering and tragedy like I do. You want to do something NOW. You want to spring into action. Head to wherever the tragedy is, to whomever is suffering, swoop in and fix it.

The truth is that there are no quick fixes to tragedy, and lots of organizations (the Red Cross, Samaritan’s Purse) respond immediately. Even individually, we are good at clearing our consciences by helping or offering to help right away.

But what happens a month later? Or a year later? Or 10 years later?

The woman who has lost her husband unexpectedly continues to grieve well after the funeral is over. The mother who loses a child aches forever. When the camera crews go home after a hurricane or a tornado, the work continues. The rebuilding doesn’t stop. I remember standing in the moldy, water-stained house of a family in North Carolina a year after their community was destroyed by a hurricane. Almost everything they had belonged to FEMA, and our little crew from Indiana barely remembered the storm.

My heroes are first-responders of any kind. The men and women who rush in when others are fleeing. They are a special breed of human, and sometimes I think that if I am not built to be a first-responder then maybe I can’t help at all.

We need first-responders. Desperately. But we also need second-responders. And third. And tenth. We need–and need to be–people who show up not just on the day of but on the day after. And days after. Who step in when the wounds we can see have been bandaged but the wounds we can’t see are still oozing.

I don’t know how we do that except to be responsible for our own intake of information. Maybe we need to clear our Twitter feeds of celebrity gossip and TV shows (guilty) and fill it with news sources, relief agencies, charitable organizations. Maybe we need to watch the news once in a while or read a newspaper.

Maybe we need to do more. (Check out what a couple of guys from our denomination are doing to support the Ebola relief in Liberia.)

Maybe we need to read the articles and look at the pictures and sit with our grief when these things happen. We don’t need to feel good and happy all the time. We can mourn with those who mourn. (I should also say that there are times when we need to not to do this, too. Say, if a personal tragedy is still fresh and raw. We can step away for a time from situations that will cause us more grief personally. It’s just easy for that to turn into an all-out avoidance of any kind of suffering. I know this from personal experience.)

What other ideas do you have?

An inspiring book on this subject is Eugene Cho’s Overrated. What a challenge to us to stop being in love with the idea of changing the world and actually start changing the world.

And if you’ve never heard the song “Now the News” by Eli, check it out and let yourself be challenged by its message.

Why we're better together

15 people. Teen-aged to middle aged. Families. Couples. Solo travelers. This is the demographic that makes up our team heading to Kenya this summer.

It’s been a long time since I was a member of a team taking a trip, longer still since I was part of a group traveling internationally. Most of my recent travel has been as a couple or a family, with Phil doing much of the planning (or us collaborating) and the decisions and finances ours alone.

On those distant-memory trips, I was a college student, serving at a children’s home in Oklahoma or in a community hit by hurricane in North Carolina. I was traveling with other college students in Europe, some trips pre-planned, others a little more spontaneous.

Once, I ventured off on my own to walk through the museum at Wimbledon, where the tennis tournament is played. I was slightly obsessed with Pete Sampras at the time and needed to see the actual place, as long as I was close. I remember boarding the train and leaving my friends on the platform in London. I shed a couple of tears because I wasn’t the sort of person who was confident about traveling on her own. But I recovered and set off on a memorable adventure. Relief filled me when I was reunited with my friends. (There was another time when I rode the train by myself from Grantham, England to Edinbourgh, Scotland to meet my friends who had set out a day ahead of me. Together, we then traveled to the Isle of Skye. But I’ll stop now with the memories before I become homesick for a home that’s not a home.)

Solo travel is not my preferred way because I don’t always trust myself with the details. Also, there’s no one else to lean on if things should go wrong. But teamwork takes some getting used to if it’s been a while, and for a recovering control freak (that’s me!), teamwork takes patience and trust, things of which I am often in short supply.

Let me tell you about my recent teamwork experiences, though. They are making me believe, again, that solo travel is not my preferred way through life, either. That life is better together, even when it’s hard.

Zack Minor | Creative Commons | via unsplash

Zack Minor | Creative Commons | via unsplash

Our Kenya team recently organized and planned and pulled off a silent auction and luncheon as our second fund-raising event. I confess that when it comes to fund-raising, my efforts are dismal. I don’t like to sell things and since we live in an area that’s not our home, we can’t even beg our families to support us, at least not when we’re selling things. In our efforts to raise money through local events, I have felt like our contribution has been minimal. I beat myself up about whether we’re doing enough to help. Many of our friends are part of the church and would already support the team. And our families are supporting us in other ways (namely, watching our kids while we’re gone, for which we’re hugely thankful).

It is easy for me to feel like I’m not giving enough because my standards for myself are so high. Combined with insecurity and a desire to please people, I constantly feel like I’m not pulling my weight. And not just with this team, but with any team I’m on. My value is linked to my perspective of how I’m contributing, and in my eyes I’m always coming up short.

Maybe everyone else feels that way, too, I don’t know. What I do know is that my view changes when I consider all the different and necessary ways each member of the team contributes.

Prior to the auction, several of us were collecting donations. Some did shopping for food and other supplies. Others worked on publicity for the event. There were people prepping food in the days leading up to the event. And on the day of, there were people setting up the auction items, baking the potatoes, preparing the toppings. There were people serving food and organizing the auction and cleaning up trays and washing dishes. At times that day I still felt like I wasn’t doing enough, but at the end of the day, when nearly all the auction items had been claimed, I was satisfied.

Because it was truly a team effort. Sure, I didn’t have anyone there who was bidding on items, but I had people who had contributed items. And the items I had collected for the event were bid on by someone I didn’t know. And maybe I couldn’t help set up but I washed dishes (along with a dynamite team of teenagers who dried dishes and who make me think the teenage years, when they come, are going to be just fine).

The mark of a good team is having a variety of skills and abilities present and everyone using those skills and abilities to help the team’s cause. My job as a member of any team is not to do all the work but to do the work I’m able to do and to let other people do the work they’re able to do. I hope that doesn’t sound like a cop-out, but in recognizing my tendency to control, I’ve learned that it’s okay to not do it all, even if I think I could do it better. (I can’t.) wpid-img_3661.jpg

That same weekend my friend Alison and I taught a writing workshop on blogging at a one-day conference our writers’ group puts on. A few days before, Alison was sick with some kind of super-illness and there was a chance she wasn’t going to be feeling well enough to lead it with me. We’d designed the workshop to suit our styles and expertise: I talked about some of the philosophies and principles of blogging while Alison focused more on the technical side of things. It’s a great workshop (if I’m allowed to say so) that balances a lot of information, and the thought of teaching the whole thing myself terrified me because I don’t understand the technical side of blogging the way Alison does.

Fortunately, she was well enough that day to teach, and the workshop was better for it. We each did our part and did it well. We make a great team.

And it’s the same in my marriage, when I let it be. Phil and I are a team. We’re working together toward the same goal. We each have qualities that contribute positively toward our marriage and what needs to be accomplished. One example: yesterday while I was out of the house, he organized the dirty dishes for me, sorting them so like items were with like items (and yes, we have enough dirty dishes in our house that they need to be sorted so they don’t overtake our entire kitchen). I don’t understand why it’s easier for me to wash dishes when they’re sorted, but it is, and he knew that and it helped me get a better handle on the cleaning.

On the days when I think I’d be better off going it alone, whatever the circumstance, I think about the value of team work. About inviting other people into my life. How much better it is to work alongside people and share the burdens.

We’re better together, you and I. I hope you know that, too.

What is your reaction to team work?

Are you open to sharing the load or are you more of a control freak?

How do you invite other people into your daily life?