What a day! It seems like your emotional landscape shifts every fifteen minutes.
One minute you are excited about the impact that we could have here, the next it feels hopeless. That’s what today did to me.
This morning we headed off to “Sons of God” orphanage. The director, Maccene Hyppolite – who is a physician, pastor, orphanage director – is an amazing man with an extraordinary family. He is caring for kids that were living on piles of rubble, who’s parents were killed in the earthquake or who have a mom or dad who simply can’t provide for them. 124 kids are packed into this place.
One little guys had been rescued from jail and a death sentence. His father, a kidnapper, would have this little boy actually shoot the victims. The boy was actually sentenced to death, but was rescued by this heroic man. According to Pastor Maccine, he is a different person now (still only 12 years old). We prayed over him.
It was fun playing with all the kids – they all wanted to get their pic taken and teach me Creole. Those of you who know how I roll know that I was eating the whole language thing UP!
The rest of the morning was spent visiting pastor Eduard (great name) at his church of 500 people. He was a very sharp guy who helped me begin to understand the situation down here a little better. We had a wonderful prayer time over him. He cried as we prayed. Wow!
This afternoon we split up and visited 2 different churches and pastors. The one I was at had a small tent village beside it. The people wanted us to pray over them. It was BLISTERING hot (sweat through your shirt and pants hot) but the people wanted us to pray over them. It was a fabulous time, but the highlight was praying with a woman, who’s daughter was killed in the earthquake. She still cries every day. She asked for prayer that she could serve Christ more! I thought of that line in the book of Job about the person of Job: through all this Job did not sin nor did he blame God (Job 1:22).
So here’s a description of the river of thought that I’m trying to ford: There is so much need here. Keep in mind, I’ve been to needy third-world places. Heck, I can see one out my bedroom window. So it’s not that I have the fog of the “I thought America was the norm” delusion just clearing away. Haiti is different. It seems MORE broken than anywhere I’ve been. And that’s without factoring in a disaster of historic proportions on top of the already tragic situation. Every pastor I’ve met so far has urgent needs. Every one of them is sacrificing more than we can imagine. Every situation is dire – “we are out of food, we are feeding people and are out of food.” If you can’t help them all, then you are stuck with some really gnarly decision. Who do you NOT help. Wow! Then throw this in: this is a spiritually ripe time in Haiti. It is a “kairos” moment.
I’ll let you know when I have this all figured out. One thing I do know is we can do something. I also know this we can do MORE if we do it together. And we can do even greater things if we link with other communities doing “MORE TOGETHER.”
Check out the posts of some of the other people down here with me.
Marko’s blog
Doug Pagget’s blog
David Hayward’s blog
Tash McGill’s blog
Seth Barne’s blog
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