Through the Looking Glass: Haiti Part I

I have spent most of today talking about Haiti.  Reflecting on it with different people, through breakfast, lunch, a meeting with a professor, outreach, and a car ride home.  Much of my thought today has been spent either attempting to process and articulate that experience, or avoiding it.

I plan, over the coming weeks, to share some of my favorite stories with you.  This trip is full of God, and there is much to tell.

It feels that although I recount this experience from the view of a person who was there, a first-hand knowledge, in reflecting on it in my own, quiet moments of solitude and thought, that I was not actually there.  I am telling someone else's story.

That girl in the pictures who looks like me - she cannot be me.  I am looking at a mirage, a doppelganger.  I feel as though I am a diver, peering into a submarine in the vast, wide ocean.  Through a misty, cracked glass window pane, from this world into that one, this lifetime into someone else's experience.  I did not experience that just one week ago. 

There were moments when my heart cried out in blackened despair, Lord, where are you?!  Do you see this? How can this be?  There were moments where I wanted to throw my hands up and walk away.  There were moments when I wanted to cry, and to shake my fists at God.  There were moments that disheartened me in ways that reminded me of the deep, deep wretchedness of people and the reign that Satan (temporarily) holds over so much of the world. 

But even as I cried these prayers of hopelessness out to my God, prayers of bleak and shadowy circumstance, of parched souls craving water, and of hardened hearts needing grace, I was also so greatly encouraged.  By the team that accompanied, and in many ways carried me through this trip - their prayerful-ness, their servanthood, their joy, their flexibility, and their humor.  By the organization we are working with (http://HaitiLove.net), and its founder, who has significantly changed and molded my understanding of missiology and international work, simply by sharing his experience and wrestling with the hardest of issues in true humility.  By my Haitian brothers and sisters who are already alive in Christ, craving goodness and mercy.  These are men and women who taught me, through their own example (and most often without a single word) about love, mercy, leadership, dignity, compassion, and devotion.  Things that I am still understanding, and searching for in my own life.  God was mighty in the ways he provided, and was gracious in the way He showed Himself. He provided for our team far above and beyond the necessities of this trip, but out of His delight in us, His blessings overflowed. 

This cannot possibly have been only 5 days ago.

I do not know how to hold on to this experience in a way that allows it to change and shape me, but to let go enough to be faithful to the things God has placed in front of me right now.  I do not know that I have the strength to return from living out something that my heart so deeply desires, that my soul delights in, to something that I do not admire or love.  From the one thing I want to be doing, to my actual, real life...  So I will rest in this promise instead:

Whom have I in heaven but you?  And there is nothing on earth that I desire other than you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever... But for me it is good to be near God; I have made the Lord GOD my refuge, to tell of all your works.  ~ Ps. 73:25-26; 28