First World Problems...

WHEN YOU WORK for a Christian justice organization, it’s hard to complain about your petty personal problems. Dishwasher leaving spots on the glassware at home? Don’t mention it in the office or you get called out for a “First World problem.” Not happy with your cable company? “Dude, First World problem!” retorts a colleague, pouring coffee into his Amnesty International mug before a meeting on income inequality.

I work with people who have traveled the world working for peace and freedom, who have spent time in jail for their beliefs, but who show no sympathy when L.L. Bean messes up my order. (I purchased the medium winter pullover from their activewear collection, but they sent me a small. And it pinches when I lift my arms to pray during chapel.)

In short, my peers are saints working for a better world. And fortunately for them, they don’t have to look outside the office to see what’s wrong with that world, for I walk among them. I am he (or maybe him), the self-centered manchild whose personal preoccupations give a counterbalance to the righteous intentions of my colleagues. It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it.

And that somebody needs new kitchen cabinets.

In my defense—I hurriedly explain to officemates rushing to their next strategy meeting on climate change, this time carrying coffee mugs from Greenpeace—our old cabinets are SO last century. In fact, they were made in the same century as the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, a minor monarch whose death prompted the conflagration of World War I. But back to my cabinets.

See how I did that? I shifted from one of the darkest periods of the 20th century to trivial thoughts about new stuff in my house. And from new cabinets to thoughts of kitchen paint schemes is but a short step down the sordid trail to shameless self-indulgence. But such is the thrall of the First World and its petty charms that one can hardly escape.

Even during my annual trip to an orphanage for sick children in Honduras, one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere, in the city with one of the highest murder rates in the world, in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in that city, I was distracted by thoughts of contemporary laminates.

Shame on me, of course. Not that it mattered, since I was unable to stimulate any interest for the topic at the orphanage. It was like being at Sojourners, but with better coffee.

I tried to get the children to weigh in on the choice between brushed nickel and pewter—as regards to drawer hardware—but I noted their singular lack of empathy, despite my best attempts to talk in a most animated fashion, even going so far as to use actual Spanish. (I know the word for “kitchen,” but I had trouble with “self-closing drawers.”)

Far better, I discovered, was to speak in the international language of friendship: Angry Birds. The game is on my smart phone, which was immediately confiscated by eager young hands and not returned to me until the day of my departure.

BUT BEFORE I left, my mind was finally cleared of thoughts of First World kitchens. It happened at exactly midnight, New Year’s Eve, when I was awakened by the sounds of explosions and small-arms fire reminiscent of either a full-scale allied invasion or an average-size wedding in Afghanistan.

It’s a Honduran tradition, I was told, using munitions purchased from local gang members freelancing outside their primary business model of illicit drugs and bicycle theft. And it lasted exactly two hours, after which it calmed to an occasional sporadic explosion over the next few days, each one timed (coincidentally, I think) to my kitchen deliberations. It was the coarsest of behavior modification but also a clear call for repentance from an angry God. Or maybe angry Chinese munitions manufacturers. Either way, it was instructive: Kitchens are not important. They make you flinch.

Two other things occurred to me during my trip: Overweight gang members look funny on little bikes that don’t belong to them. And children with compromised immune systems can outplay me in Angry Birds, every time.