God's Plan

Today I went with a group from 4 Corners to clean and paint a Domestic Violence Shelter.  It is one of those things that you wouldn't know needed doing unless someone told you, in this case one of the staff attends our church. I am reading a book titled Mountains Beyond Mountains about a doctor, Paul Farmer, a Harvard Medical School graduate, who dedicates his life to medicine and social injustice and lived in Haiti most of the period that this book was being written, working with the rural poor. It is a very compelling story. The author asks, "How could a just God permit great misery?" Farmer gave him his translation of the Haitian proverb, "God gives but doesn't share', stating that "God gives us humans everything we need to flourish, but he's not the one to divvy up the loot. That charge was laid upon us." As I scrubbed the dried food of many suppers off the kitchen chairs in the shelter, I thought of what it would mean to live in the plan of God, to share. What kind of sharing would it take to keep women and children from having to hide in a shelter? What do I need to share for those in misery to flourish, to fulfill God's plan for all of us? Ice cream for thought....