This afternoon I arrived in Toronto following a five-day visit to our church partners in Haiti. What I witnessed there is beyond anything I could have imagined—unbelievable destruction and suffering on the one hand, and amazing hope and faith-filled action on the other.

This is the first of several reports we will make about our visit. (More in a moment about who travelled with me.) You can see my video message from Haiti on YouTube.

As announced last week, I leave for Haiti tomorrow, along with a few other United Church representatives.

I'm grateful for many notes of encouragement, some of which have made connections between the journey of the Haitian people and the resurrection story of Easter.

The people of Haiti are certainly engaged in "practising resurrection," as a Wendell Berry poem puts it, and it will be humbling, no doubt, to hear and see their stories of courage.

Our little family hadn’t yet finished eating dinner last Saturday when Earth Hour arrived, so we turned off the electric lights. As candlelight softened faces, the conversation hardened. It was difficult and painful to contemplate some of the questions raised by the week’s headlines. Weakening ecological health. Deepening distrust in the church. Tensions between those for whom the church embodies a community of hope and those for whom it represents the weight of oppression.

Mary Ann Hodge, the Chair of the Environment Committee of First-St. Andrew’s United Church of London, Ontario, was kind enough to send along her news release this week describing how they at First-St. Andrew’s have taken up the Moderator’s challenge. In their words, they have

Last week the bread bakers of Wilmot United Church in Fredericton, New Brunswick, reported in. These good folks had just finished preparing 2,297 packages of flour to be sent across our beloved church—and were getting ready to do more! Each of our church’s 13 Conferences was asked to provide locally milled flour.

Today’s newspapers are full of stories about the changing face of Canada, including Statistics Canada’s projections that minorities will be majorities in two Canadian cities by 2031.

As the stars were gathering in Hollywood on Sunday, another group of stars was gathering at Eastminster United Church to celebrate how churches and other communities of faith are turning deeper and deeper green. It was fun to be there.

Hope-filled conversations about my letter of January 17 continue, and I am deeply grateful for your dozens of blog comments, other blog postings, hundreds of e-mails, and many newspaper articles and letters to the editor. Here’s the opening to an opinion piece (“Let’s bring some hope to our fragile planet”) published just last Saturday, February 20, in the Kamloops Daily News (Kamloops), page A12, written by Dawne Taylor:

I suppose the disciples had no more warning than I did—but they didn’t need to think about their answers being recorded digitally!

Last weekend, as Manitobans commemorated the life of Louis Riel, I joined a youth gathering (named Zeebu) in Portage la Prairie and sang a fair bit of Our Lady Peace.

Their song “Innocent,” for example, with its compelling line “But it all seems so contagious, not to be yourself and faceless.” With over 80 inspiring United Church young adult leaders and youth helping one another be themselves, I saw powerful inoculation against “contagious facelessness.”