So here I sit in the comforts of my home, after having slept in my own bed, safe from the dangers of roving robbers, or the discomforts of starvation. It's an odd realization knowing that those I left behind in Haiti still live in their sheet houses and weep as their child goes to bed hungry. Living in the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, I can step back and look at the differences between Haiti and Honduras and I marvel. Honduras had a 7.3 earthquake, 75 miles off the coast of La Ceiba, in May of last year. Our house shook like nobodies business, and I wondered if our cement house would collapse upon us. The fear I felt must have been nothing like the fear of the Haitian people. In 40 seconds their world was changed. Over 200,000 people have been buried, and they suppose about that many sill remain under the rubble. The desperation I saw in the faces around me as (according to one of our interpreters), their futures have been taken from them. The little hope they had of going to school and getting a decent job has been taken from them as 75% of the schools in Port-au-Prince have been destroyed. This is a disaster that a whole generation will suffer the effects from.
I am in my living room typing this on my computer, and know that the future for my child is as secure as it can be. I can only imagine the anguish a mother must feel knowing that there is no "hope" for her child. The only hope I see from this is the hope that can only be found in Jesus Christ. I continue to pray for the people of Haiti. For the lives lost and for the lives that are struggling. I pray that I will not lose or forget the experience I had and remember what it's like to be in their situation. I will be forever changed by the experience I had there, and I pray that God was able to use my hands to lessen the pain for just a little while, someone who was grieving. To give a hug to someone who was/is in emotional pain. To show love to someone who has lost all hope. To bring a new life into the world, and to help ease the pain of a man who lost his child in front of my eyes.
My dear friend Mindy sent this to me while I was in the midst of struggles while in Haiti. May it ease your soul as it did mine:
"On Sunday Pastor Reddit got up to do the call to worship. He began with an excerpt from Henry Ward Beecher's "Life Thoughts". This is how it went:
What would you say of a pilgrim commissioned of God to travel up and down the earth singing melody, which, when one heard, caused him to forget whatever sorrow he had? And so the singing angel goes on his way through all the lands singing in the language of every nation, driving away trouble by the pulse of the air which his tongue moves with divine power. Behold just such a one! This pilgrim God has sent to speak in every language on the globe. It has charmed more griefs to rest than all the philosophy of the world. It has remanded to their dungeon more felon thoughts, more black doubts, more thieving sorrows, than there are sands on the sea-shore. It had comforted the noble host of the poor. It has sung courage to the army of the disappointed. It has poured balm and consolation into the heart of the sick, of captives in dungeons, of widows in their pinching griefs, of orphans in their loneliness. Dying soldiers have died easier as it was read to them; ghastly hospitals have been illuminated; it has visited the prisoner, and broken his chains, and, like Peter's angel, led him forth in the imagination, and sung him back to his home again. It has made the dying Christian slave freer than his master, and consoled those whom, dying, he left behind mourning, not so much that he was gone, as because they were left behind and could not go too. Nor is its work done. It will go singing to your children and my children, and to their children, through all the generations of time; nor will it fold its wings till the last pilgrim is safe, and time ended; and then it shall fly back to the bosom of God, whence it issued, and sound on, mingled with all those sounds of celestial joy which make heaven musical for ever.
And when he finished he began to read the 23rd Psalm. The entire congregation, unprompted, lifted their voices in reciting along with him. All I could do was listen. The tears sprang to my eyes for all the times that this very pilgrim has traveled with me. Now, may it travel with you and all those alongside you.
Psalm 23
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name's sake. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
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