One Pail at a Time

When we pulled up to the site of a church member’s former
home I couldn’t help being a bit of a pessimist. As one of my team members put
it, the air was so thick it was hard to move, there was enough heat to fry an
egg on the sidewalk and the pile of rubble we were there to remove could have
kept a backhoe busy for days. Within a few moments after arriving the team of
ten along with some Haitians were working hard loading up wheelbarrows full of
debris making quite the dent in the massive pile of crumbled concrete and
twisted rebar.

Not too long after we started I noticed a woman load up a
little two gallon pail full of rocks and walk off with it. I figured she was
taking them to fill in a pothole or maybe use them for something in her house
but she just kept coming back again and again. Eventually my curiosity took
over and I decided to figure out where she was taking it and if there was any
way I could help her with what she was doing. With a full wheelbarrow I followed
her along out to the main road. I had already taken the path a dozen times
before to dump the rubble on the pile next to the street. I figured that
shortly she would turn off to her house or wherever she was headed but the closer
we got the more I began to wonder. Then it happened. We arrived at the pile
next to the street, she unloaded her pail, took a short break and headed back
to the site.

My immediate thought was to find a translator to tell her to
stop. It was completely irrational to be filling up that little bucket and
walking all that way when there were so many of us who were able to do the work
so much more efficiently. We had shovels and wheelbarrows and so many people. The
work she was doing was, in my mind, a complete waste of time and was not helping
anything.

Not three seconds after that a thought popped into my mind
that was clearly God rebuking me. “You are wrong. Look at how much you can
learn from this woman.” Then it all made since. I had let myself become
overwhelmed with all the destruction and had almost forgotten about how much
the little things count. I had taken the famous saying ‘go big or go home’ way
too far. Not only was it affecting my time in Haiti but it was affecting my
life. We can’t let ourselves get overwhelmed with the problems of the world. We
all have the power to change the world and we can do it one pail at a time.