So much of the media centers around gloom and doom and economic woes, corruption, war, and scores of problems that plague our world. I fear that our 24/7 news outlets resemble more the voyeurism we find on the freeway, where traffic gets backed up due to people not being in a car wreck, rather lines of cars queue up to simply get a look at someone else’s misfortune.

We’re in danger of becoming a cynical culture that peddles more pessimism than hope and now with the latest and greatest technology, this fascination that pockets of humanity has with the fall of other people, can now go viral. My hope is that with all of the current protests going on, whether it’s Wall Street or Greece, whether it’s in the West or the Majority World, people don’t forget to hope, to point to something better, to say at least a few things that remind us of something beautiful.

This Blog Post Originally Ran as 10% Christian Living at:

http://www.catalystspace.com/content/read/AUG10_article_10_christian_living_-_buckley/

Here it is again:

10% Christian Living

Recently during a radio interview for Humanitarian Jesus the interviewer tried to sum up the idea of living as a Christian humanitarian as follows:

"So what you’re really saying, what you really want people to do, is to take part of their tithe, you know the 10%, and direct that to social causes and need, right?"

1/15 UPDATE: Kristen and her daughter are back on US soil. They were evacuated in the middle of the night to a military base in New Jersey. They will be home by this evening. 

My sister-in-law, Kristen Howerton, was in Haiti with her infant daughter and soon to be adopted son when a 7.0 earthquake struck. You know her as the author of the Mama Manifesto blog here on Conversant Life. Kristen has not updated her Conversant column but, she has been able to post to her personal blog. You can click here to read her story so far.

She has been in contact with her husband, Mark, and all three are safe. The Livesays, the American missionaries she's with are also OK. The children at the orphanage made it out of the building safely. You can read updates from the Livesays and Kristen at http://www.livesayhaiti.blogspot.com/. They are updating as often as they possibly can in the midst of power outages and general chaos.