Author's Note: This is a post I shared last week on Facebook, with a few minor tweaks and additions here and there. Please keep in mind that the "Hope for Haiti Now" Telethon airs tonight on several networks beginning at 8 p.m. ET. Please consider making a donation to help our brothers and sisters in need. Proceeds will be split among relief organizations including the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, the UN World Food Programme, Oxfam America, the Red Cross, UNICEF and Wyclef Jean's Yele Haiti Foundation. If telethons aren't your thing, you can always donate online directly to Unicef or The American Red Cross.  - K

 The paradox of living comfortably is that there are moments where it can feel pretty damn uncomfortable.

Sure times are bad, and in America we love to complain about it. I know I do. There's some level of relief in being able to whine about how times suck because no one has any money. We flip the giant working class bird to Wall Street as it continues to rain its down its fiscal chaos from high atop its Olympian mountain of bonus cash. It's certainly not undeserved, but still they don't listen, and the cycle of transgression and complaint seems to churn endlessly.

And as middle class Americans, one of our secrets is that we sort of derive a certain level of satisfaction from it, because it gives us an excuse to feel put upon. We feel a certain level of reckoning is owed to us for all this financial injustice, and maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Whatever the answer is, that sense of victimization makes it feel okay for me to bitch when I have to cut back on whatever creature comfort it is I'm after. Granted, I am mostly a person who enjoys simple pleasures and doesn't really ask for much. But really, what kind of difficult life am I living when the worst thing that happens to me in the morning is that I'm out of coffee creamer?

Normally, you wouldn't think about it much. But Haiti really throws all of our privileged minutiae -- and it is very, very privileged -- into high relief. And I don't know about you, but I always feel incredibly restless when these kinds of disasters hit for that very reason. Suddenly, nothing seems right, and really it has never been right, but instead of going about your daily business with that ever present inward focus, you have to look up and stare human suffering in the face. Now that is the true reckoning.

The majority of the Haitian population lives on less than $2 a day.

That wouldn't even buy the coffee creamer I just spent the first moments of my morning groaning about. Seriously. The American lifestyle, with all its economic messes, still adds up to a pretty damned charmed existence when compared with how an impoverished majority of the world lives every day.

It made me think back to this time when I was just out of high school when I did my first and only fast. A fast, for anyone unfamiliar, is basically when you don't eat for an extended period of time, either for some sort of cause or because you're in prayer about something or for some other reason that's important to you. There's lots of reasons why people do it. This particular fast was a 48 hour event. One of the youth group moms got it into her head that we would do a hunger drive to raise money for the Haitian children living in poverty who fetch their meals from garbage heaps on a daily basis. This actually is the way many Haitian children survive, if you can imagine it; I can't really imagine it.

Now, I will be perfectly frank here: I am an eater. I can certainly go without sleep, but if you take away my dinner, I will get cranky on your ass. Up until that point in my life, I had never known what it was really like to go without food. My family is and always has been a working class family -- times have been thin, but there has always, always been something to eat somewhere. We've never starved. I still remember that gnawing feeling of desperation late on that second day of having had no food whatsoever. It does funny things to your mind. Even if you do know that you'll soon be able to eat, its like your body doesn't know and there is some psychology at play there.

 I made it through the two days (barely!), and when we reconvened at the end, the mother handed us all a tiny cup of beans with some rice in it and no forks. She told us this would be the amount of food we would be given if we were being fed by a relief agency, and we had to eat it with our hands because that's how the children over there did it. Another footnote here is that I absolutely hate re fried beans. Ick. But let me tell you, in my hunger weakness I scarfed that little bowl down in seconds, forks be damned. In a sort of sickening twist, she brought in pizza after, but honestly I felt a little like a jerk eating it. After that whole ordeal, I never really looked at pizza the same way again.

What I'm getting at here is that it just doesn't make any sort of sense why there is so much suffering in some places, and such abundance in others. Still, I don't think God wants us to feel guilty for being blessed. However, I do believe he expects that we share those blessings by helping those in need whenever we can. Doing what we can to share in the sacrifice and suffering of others is how we all become just a little more like humans, and a little more like God.