My thoughts, prayers, and work, my sadness and hope, are with people in Haiti today. I’ll be there all next week. A few links while reflecting on the earthquake and the two years since:

1. Today I did a “two years later” interview on Patheos that is here.

2. This prayer I wrote for the Washington Post a year ago, and I think it’s still my prayer: here.

3. Check out our two year updates on our Haiti Partners work here. My friend and colleague John doing a great 2-minute video report.

4. Also as a kind of prayer/psalm, you could watch this 2-minute After Shock video either over on the right side of this page or here.

5. Read the Spirit is rerunning an interview I’d done with them. Was a good conversation: here.

6. I’m on Miami’s PBS TV station for a panel discussion today. Will add a link when it airs and is online.

Just wrote a blog for InterVarsity looking back on their Urbana conference, which I attended with two friends from Haiti just two weeks before the earthquake two years ago. (A theme of twos in that previous sentence.) Thinking back on that event, what has happened since, and what is ahead. You can read it here: Just Before the Earth Shook.

(Wrote this for InterVarsity’s blog.)

I’ve never donned a beard or red suit for Christmas. So far that’s my personal line.

But something happens when you have kids. Categories of cool, kitsch, hip, tacky, etc., no longer matter much. It’s a short distance from this to mowing the lawn wearing black dress tube socks with sandals while wearing a Santa hat (I live in Florida; this is possible), but mostly the shift is a good, liberating change.

Why? Because you’re freed from caring what others think of you, and even a bit from what you think of you, into concentrating more on how you can love others. In this case, particularly for one’s children.

Our hand-me-down Christmas tree, though plastic, has lost half its needles, but I love it because my two-year-old son and six-year-old daughter love it. I hung Christmas lights on the house for the first time in my life. For the amount of effort and near falls off the little stepladder, it should have yielded a neighborhood spectacular. Instead we have one simple line of colorful LED icicles across the top of the garage. Yet the kids proudly cheered.

Last night I was preparing our kids to go to the town Christmas parade, which pre-progeny I would have avoided. Just before getting in the car I received a text from a family my wife and I remain very close to from our time living and working in Haiti.

The text’s essence: Sorry to bother you with this, but our families are hungry, all of us, including the children, and we’re struggling without enough money to buy food.

Takes a little of the “Ho, Ho, Ho!” out of the parade.

But not in a bad way. It’s never bad to be called to pay attention to love. I need reminders all the time, sometimes subtly, sometimes with a smack.

In this case, the reminder is to keep the ache of Advent—which means “coming”—alive in all its hope and discomfort.

We’re in a season of anticipating the incarnation, a once and done event in Jesus. But there’s still an awful ache for hopeful arrival, isn’t there?

For the message Jesus read from Isaiah at the opening of his ministry to be realized in our communities.

For that presence of grace and peace to be realized and renewed again in our lives.

For nobody to have to send a text like the one my friends sent yesterday.

So I don’t mind if the jolly, white-bearded one shows up in the parade, as long as another bearded one shows up prominently this season too: John the Baptist. This is Advent and Incarnation through Mark’s gospel, which doesn’t start with a birth narrative but with John shouting from the banks of the Jordan River, “Prepare the way.”

Because I think John the Baptist is a realist Santa, who instead of 50%-off shortcuts to what is jolly, actually points toward a realist route to a truer joy.

Repentance. Preparation. Humility. Judgment. Justice.

Scrooge, some would say, a list like that at Christmas time!

No, Scrooginess would be to obstruct real joy by settling for a counterfeit. I want generous helpings of the real thing, even if I would prefer milk and cookies to locusts and honey.

I want the liberating joy we can find when we care less about what others think of us and care more about pointing humbly toward the one who cares deeply about all of us.

I want joy that can survive (that doesn’t avoid, but responds to) the text I received from my friends in Haiti.

The jingling jolliness of this season is fun with my kids, but can’t survive adult reality. (Christmas commercialism is the market’s logical response to society’s arrested spiritual development.) Joy that can survive comes in glimpses of the good news John was preparing us for, that we await each Advent to come anew, because we desperately need to hear it all over again, year after year: that somehow God is with us, yes, even in all of this.

This is sublime joy that can endure, which arrives with Love itself being born, even unto us, in a stable of straw and muck.

My daughter attended her first day of kindergarten today. A poignant milestone dressed up in an exceptionally cute plaid jumper.

My wife and I thought we were pretty cool with it. Our daughter had attended preschool, after all, so this wasn’t a major logistical change. She was excited as we dropped her off, said goodbye with a smile over her shoulder, then back to drawing in her new notebook.

We still thought we were cool with it after we signed up for PTA at the courtyard table. We ran into the local rabbi. My wife is pastor at a Lutheran church in town and they cross paths regularly. The rabbi’s third child was starting kindergarten. He’s an old hand at this.

We only realized we might not really be so cool with it after we had stood talking with him, kept talking, kept standing and the rabbi finally said, “You know, she’s in her class. You’re allowed to leave now.”

Busted.

So we left. I was happy all day knowing she was in this great, free, local school here in South Florida where we live. But after dropping her off and walking a couple blocks to my office, I then worked on education issues for children in Haiti.

Joy is always accompanied by a shadow if you see the world realistically, even more so if you’re personally engaged for justice with people who struggle in hard circumstances.

Our seven elementary schools in Haiti, with 1,100 girls and boys, open in the weeks ahead. I’m happy for them and all the children in Haiti starting school soon, but approximately 1 million school-aged children don’t get to attend. Haiti wants to be able to educate its own children, and parents are willing to sacrifice, but the resources are too scarce. Today that is Joy’s dark, way-too-big shadow.

My daughter had a great day: “I love kindergarten! I love my teacher!”

Now at the end of the day, she’s here curled up next to me reading an Olivia book. It makes typing more awkward, but sweeter. Now I’m thinking back on the day, about talking with the rabbi, about the schools in Haiti, about the lack of schools. I’m thinking about parents I’ve known in Haiti whose children couldn’t go to school.

The last months in the U.S. have been marked by discouraging, contentious disagreement. But today I find some hope that amidst dissension on politics, economics, theology and a thousand different things, there are issues like this that are an incredible opportunity for unity: Every child in the world should have access to good primary education.

I’m not going to break into hymn or a John Lennon ballad. After more than eight years working in Haiti, what excites me is real, gritty, day-by-day, hard-fought partnership and progress.

So we shouldn’t just endorse the ideal. That’s meaninglessly easy. More of us should be investing in education, not just for our own children, but for tens of millions of children in countries like Haiti where their potential isn’t being nurtured.

Tonight, on this fun, hope-filled first day of school, I can’t think of a better way to make joy’s shadow shrink a little and make way for more light.

Also on Huffington Post.

Just read Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends with my five-year-old daughter. Somehow I’d never read his poems before, not as a kid or adult. What a delight.

Look forward to reading more with my kids (though I did skip a poem now and then). I’m a few decades late to the party, but glad to arrive.

When we finished, my daughter and I decided to write a poem in tribute to, in gratitude for, in attempt to be in the tradition of, Silverstein:

The Itchy Scratchy Girl

There was a girl with an itch on her nose,

so she scratched her toes.

The same girl had an itch on her thigh,

so she scratched her eye.

It was a little confusing,

this itching and scratching.

We couldn’t tell if she was missing or catching,

this itch moving all the time.

She started to scratch her tongue

and said, “I’ve got an itch down in my lung.”

She kept reaching to find her itch,

but instead kept finding a rhyme.

Then said she,

“My whole body does itch!”

Ran straight to me,

and started to scratch.

Shel Silverstein‘s Where the Sidewalk Ends on Amazon here.

“The Itchy Scratchy Girl” © Simone & Kent Annan