While my daughter Bethany was sloshing about (and taking entirely too long) in our ensuite bathtub tonight, I wandered over to the bedroom TV and turned on CNN.  There was Anderson Cooper, right in the thick of the Haitian nightmare, reporting on the earthquake aftermath from Ground Zero.  He showed footage his team had shot earlier in the day:  Dead bodies lining sidewalks, living bodies savaged and unable to reach medical help, family members wailing and searching and despairing. 

A 13-year-old girl named Bea was trapped face down beneath rubble, only her bare feet were visible jutting out from an enormous slab of concrete.  Her younger brother sat on his haunches on a heap of debris close by, listening to her cries, while several older relatives argued desperately with each other about the best way to free her and stubbornly kept at it with one ridiculous shovel until all at once she was free.  Her leg was broken but no one tried to get her to a hospital (there were reports that people who'd had limbs torn off had been waiting for medical attention for 18 hours).  She was OK, and while she answered the crew's questions through a translator, a relative fussed fiercely and tenderly with her hair ...

Let me say this second:  Please pray for my dear friend Karen Taylor and Compassion Canada CEO Barry Slauenwhite.  Karen and I had several conversations last week about my upcoming tour; we were racing the clock to get our planning done because she and Barry were taking a team of Canadian pastor couples to Haiti on Monday.  They landed in Haiti about 1 hour before the quake and were able to get a text out that they made it safely to the Canadian Embassy.  They haven't been heard from since -- indications are that they are safe but only God knows what they are witnessing and experiencing.  [Update 2:34pm Thursday - we've received confirmation that Karen, Barry and the group they were traveling with have all been safely evacuated to the DR, and will be returning to Canada within 24 hours.]

Let me say this third:  Earlier today my buddy Tim Dixon sent me an email teasing me about my old song "Seize The Day", in which he shared an excerpt from a blog post on Snarkmarket.com.

Here's the excerpt:

 So here’s a char­ac­ter [of American Novelist Nicholson Baker] talk­ing about Horace’s most famous phrase: Carpe diem! Seize the day! Well, er, actually:

…here’s the thing. Horace didn’t say that. “Carpe diem” doesn’t mean seize the day—it means some­thing gen­tler and more sen­si­ble. “Carpe diem” means pluck the day. Carpe, pluck. Seize the day would be “cape diem,” if my school Latin serves. No R. Very dif­fer­ent piece of advice.

There’s more, and it’s sooo good, over at Varia:

Don’t freak­ing grab the day in your fist like a burger at a fair­ground and take a big chomp­ing bite out of it. That’s not the kind of man that Horace was.

Tim suggested that in light of the post, I might want to consider changing the title of my song.  I replied that there might be some rhyming problems with the word "pluck".   And then I remembered that when we shot the video a million moons ago for "Seize the Day", we included a series of quotes, and the first was this: