“Why don’t you just send them money?” My maternal grandparents are mystified.  They want to know why my father is, at this writing, sweltering in the humid air and choking dust of Haiti.  Why should a comfortable vice-president in his sixties squander a precious vacation week every year, laboring and wheezing amidst the squalor of a trash-covered island?  A son can never fully explain his father’s business, but let me at least venture a few guesses.  Dad is risking his life in Haiti because:

1. Money doesn’t cost much.
2. My father has always given his best.
3. When he was barely a teenager, my dad’s earthly father died.  Now, as he has for over 25 years, he imitates his living Father.
4. The living Father made the rules:  life flows through life, and sometimes death.  So why should he fear?  Either way, life will result.
5. My dad is an only child.  Yet his oldest brother dropped great drops of sweat in the dust, too, and boys will be boys…
6. When my dad gives money, he can feel a little of his own pain—but he can’t feel their pain at all.
7. Dad is a drummer, but he gave that up to have kids and drum on the steering wheel of a station wagon.  So syncopation marks his life: he’s not a complacent sycophant, because Jesus went through more than mere syncope for him.  I suppose he’s working to free those Voodoo drums on the hillside, ensnared with demons, to play a different beat.
8. Money slinks around in greasy envelopes and gets stuck in dark pockets, or hidden away in secret corners.  My dad’s life is different:  it is the exposed life, the visible life, the life that touches other things.
9. Music sung is more powerful than sheet music.  “Poetry in motion” is redundant.  A dollar bill has a limited vocabulary—even if it knows Latin.  "E pluribus unum" has it backwards anyway.  Jesus is the sole legal tender for all debts, public and private, with the emphasis on “tender”.
10. Adam had tear ducts.
11. Showing up is a habit of his.  A good one.  Dad knows that God exists, because God showed up in Jesus.  So he has always made sure that his own face shows up (at soccer games, at concerts, at birthdays) as a display of God’s existence.
12. My dad spent his first decades, um, tabernacling in a trailer park.  Other blessings:  red hair, bad complexion, a father dying of cancer, and a mother who cleaned toilets in the capitol building.  Now he turns companies around, but that’s temporary.  He really lives to turn lives around.  Like the one who “ever lives to intercede.”
13. The United Nations force, covered by blue helmets and white armored Humvees, “keeps the peace” in Haiti.  My dad has to walk around Haiti holding hands with orphans because the nations are only united one way.  So much for Paul Simon’s “myth of fingerprints”. So if you fly your “Google Earth” over Hispaniola today, you will see the line of deforestation and erosion that marks the border between poor Haiti and the Dominican Republic.  But you won’t see my Dad—he’s huddled over a table, going about his business, talking about his Father. And by the way, Grampa, he sends them a lot of money every month, too.  But it doesn’t cost much.