What does it mean to live or be alive? Is it the simple in and out breaths that comes naturally to us? Is it the idea that we are organic beings, and that we bleed and grow as our days move forward? Is it being in existence… or is it more?

We have begun to live mundane lives as a species. More often than not, we talk about living with phrases like “My life sucks” or “I hate my life”. We don’t value the lives we live, because we don’t know what others have “been through” or how they were brought up. There’s no way to know what yesterday brought, or what tomorrow will bring. Instead, we flounder around in a society of negativity, patiently waiting for the next innocent victim who DARES to insult us with a positive attitude.

When I traveled to Haiti, I was expecting to find broken people with these same broken views. I started to wallow in my own self-pity for simply having to witness these destroyed humans and the way that they live, taking it as another way to express the negativity that our tainted society seems to crave.

What I found, instead, was the complete opposite of everything I’d pictured. I found a culture of people that was rich in simple joys, and full of beautiful smiles. These people that had nothing in my book began to change me from the very first moment I stepped foot off of the plane. I met families that didn’t have enough to eat, but still joked around with the kids and our group. I met school children who didn’t have shoes on their feet, but who managed to beat me in soccer every time we played. I met merchants and artists, beautiful daughters and sons and a positive community of poverty and love. My materialistic brain could barely comprehend the simple desires of this people who embraced us in our own brokenness and taught us to love. As the days went on, I found myself thinking more and more about what I COULD do, and not what I couldn’t. I began to abandon the attitude of “surviving” that I had adopted, and started thriving.

It doesn’t matter how much you have, it’s how you look at what you do have. And in our constant state of wanting more and more in the physical world, we lose sight of wanting more for our heart and our- I dare to use the word- spiritual worlds.

Being a missionary didn’t teach me how poor Haiti was, or how much the people there needed my help. It taught me how much I had to grow and learn about living as myself.

What we do with this negativity isn’t living. It’s surviving in the most mundane way. Positivism and positive language can alter your quality of life completely.

Wouldn't that be a great way to live?