A hand on my shoulder

Today at church my mind was a scrambled mess. Job applications. School work. Standards. People. The songs and the sermon were the last things on my mind, and I really was struggling to want to meet God.

And we were praying for Haiti, and it added to the inner turmoil because until now I had let it remain a piece of Very Important Headline News, of pictures and story and ink, but devoid of personal impact on my heart. But it struck me for the first time, the scale of the devastation. Not thousands, not tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands lost their lives and everything they owned in a matter of minutes. And corruption - oh how I hate corruption. This isn't the Malaysian-Thailand border, where the Thai immigration officer forces you to put a ringgit bill in for him to chop your passport. This isn't policemen allowing you off for speeding for $20. This is preventing millions of dollars of aid and relief from flowing in when you have a nation destroyed and in desperate need. And I struggled even more because it's so difficult to comprehend - how we need so much persuasion to be moved to give the spare change from that trip to Starbucks, when that means keeping an infant in Port-Au-Prince alive for another day.

My heart was heavy.

But a girl next to me I never met, her name was Kate from her nametag, as we were praying, placed her arm around my shoulder. And I turned to my left and looked at her, and she whispered to me "It's okay", and smiled. How she knew I'll never know. Perhaps I looked troubled during the sermon, perhaps I was rubbing my eyes, perhaps my posture reflected my mood.

But I felt a sudden wave of peace, and knew that was God resting His hand on me, and telling me it was okay.