Tuesday, January 31, 2012

"Tension"


Deb and I have been serving full-time in Haiti for almost a year and a half now.  I think that we are finally starting to settle in.  Over the past year, we have learned a lot, and much of what we have learned is that the less we understand the more we know.  We have learned to put up personal guards where needed to gain some sort of balance and to somewhat control the rollercoaster of emotion this place can have on you on a daily basis.  While we are striving to not just learn how to cope with being here, but to thrive in being here, it comes at the expense of who we are as people to a point.  While we love the opportunity we have been given by God to serve in this capacity, quite frankly we also completely resent it sometimes.  When I think about 2011 and look back at the year in Haiti, we have truly had a love / hate relationship with being here.  There are many things to love here.  There are many things to get excited about.  AWAKENHAITI is making a difference here and back in the states.  Buildings are going up, medicine is being distributed, kids are being educated and fed, jobs are being created, and lives are being touched and changed for Christ.  Trust me there are many blessings here.  These blessings are also compounded with constant frustrations.  Frustrations of isolation, worrying about your kids’ education, having to provide that education for them, not being able to carry out the vision you have for the ministry because there aren’t enough hands here to carry it out, lack of community, feeling like a checkbook at times, driving the streets of Port-au-Prince and still being overwhelmed by the poverty, working all day in the sun in Canaan and then having a guy on the street call you a “Mother F****r” and have the audacity to ask you for $200 in the next breath.   Living this life of extremes has taken its toll on our family this year and the lives that have served here with us.  So what’s the answer to longevity in Haiti?

“Tension”

Embracing it and living in it.  If we were to admit it, most people like to live in control.  We want to control everything around us.  We want to know what it’s going to look like, how it’s going to feel.  What is going to be the outcome of any given situation?  When we don’t have that control, we either don’t start something or if we feel like we are losing the control we once thought we had, we’ll throw in the towel, call it quits, give up and find something different that we can control.  So we live lives of either being in complete control or throwing in the towel.  Then there’s a life lived in “Tension”. Tension is a place of surrender.  Tension is a place, while very uncomfortable at first, can lead to a better understanding of who God is.  It is a place where faith is broadened and developed.  Tension is a place where dependence on Christ is real.  It is NOT a place of complacency and laziness. Tension is a place of living out the call of living for Him and not yourself.  It is living for things that have eternal value for yourselves as well as others.  Tension is a place where, while you do your best to help change a circumstance, ultimately it’s not up to you and your own efforts. 
Tension is living in a way that God is the only answer for the outcome because you have accepted that life cannot be explained any other way.  Living a life of tension and surrender is living a peaceful life.  Not one without trials and dark times, but one that has acknowledged that the God of the Universe is in complete control and surrendering to a purpose far greater than myself.

I want “Tension”

So, maybe “losing ourselves as people” to a point isn’t such a bad thing.  My prayer for our family and myself is that we learn to live in this tension, and learn to live in it well.

Jeff


Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Ashes to Beauty

Friends we met in Haiti suffered the loss of their son five years ago today. We are in awe of their perserverance. We hope with them for they know they will spend eternity with the son they never knew on this earth. We look forward celebrating victory with them in seeing the vision God has laid out before them come to life! Thus, turning ashes into beauty!
click the link for their story:
http://aussiesinhaiti.blogspot.com/2012/01/isaacs-story.html

Sunday, January 22, 2012

world of extremes

I'm still trying to understand or at least get a handle on this world of extremes in which we now live. 
Extremes:
1. Isolation...3 weeks out of every month.  It has been very difficult to connect with other families serving in Haiti  due to schedules, traffic, the unpredictability of Haiti/teams of 12-15 coming in to serve and encourage.  we find ourselves in this state of confusion...do we build walls in order to protect our hearts when people come and go or do we fully engage and feel completely blessed by the time we have been given
2. severe poverty everywhere around us, needs every direction we look/overabundance, everything anyone could ever want or need at our fingertips and still wanting more
3. always some one needing our time, attention, or help/a society that has learned to be as independent as possible to the point sometimes that we close people out or don't recognize others hurts and needs

4. Ugliness of the garbage and waste...ugliness of the conditions people are allowed to or forced to live in here/Natural beauty that is seen when you place your hand at your nose in Canaan and only look up or from the rooftop of our home
5. A government that can be corrupt and that hasn't cared about it's own people/a government that isn't perfect but implements so many laws and regulations they can seem silly and unimportant, but proves that the condition of society matters
6. Satan and all he has a hold of in this world, in this city, in this community/God and the child-like faith the poorest of poor exhibit

These are the extremes we live in. We don't fit either place but we fit both. Some days they confuse us. Other days they frustrate us. Still others, they remind us that we've been extremely blessed to have been able to live and experience both.

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Team January 2012


Team January, thank you for giving of yourselves this week for the children at Good Samaritan Orphanage and the families in the Bethanie Community in Canaan. You've made an impact and left your print here. People were blessed because of you. Even though you blessed many, we know Haiti gave you experiences and lessons you will never forget.

Jon Hand's accounts posted on the Engage Community Blog...

Yesterday we woke up, readied ourselves for the day and then gathered for morning devotions. Jeff did something different this morning. The day before we saw Port-Au-Prince. On Sunday night several of us ended up staying up late talking about the big WHY? questions. Where’s God? How can these slums exist? How can there be such slumlord slavery, corruption, and injustice? There are no quick fix answers. Jeff played a podcast sermon by his friend Don Logan. I know Don. Don is a missionary in Guatemala and has seen suffering firsthand. Don’s message was powerful. He didn’t answer the question, rather he referred to Moses and the burning bush. Moses asks whose talking? God defines his own name and says I AM. When it comes to suffering and evil and ‘how can a loving God?’ we simply don’t understand and won’t! Our modern tendency is to simply shut down if we can’t understand something or find meaning in it. But God is full of unresolvable tensions. He’s loving and personal and He’s transcendent and powerful. We can relate to Him and yet we know nothing about Him. The tension that make God, well um, God…go on and on. Don talked about how we all wear glasses. We all see and hear and interpret the world through a certain lens. When suffering strikes. When the reality of evil and injustice appears before our eyes in a new way. When the things we relied on for security and identity begin to crumble…these are moments that shatter the glasses we are wearing. They give us moments of unforeseen clarity. These are the moments when everything changes! These are burning bush moments.


This trip for many of us was a burning bush moment. It’s funny! I believe there are burning bushes all around us but sometimes you have to go away outside your country, culture, and safety to come back and actually see the burning bushes in our back yard. Then, what do you do with that? How do we stay awake at home to the burning bushes that God puts in our path? How do we revel in the unresolvable mystery of God and not try to define Him by what we want Him to be or think He should be?




On Monday we went back to Canaan. This time the school kids were singing and laughing and learning in their school that meets in the church that Awaken Haiti built. We painted and nailed and held little girls and teased little boys (See my FB for some pictures of the kids at school) and Tom taught a dental clinic. It was a good day-a fast day. Last night we showered off the dust (everything is covered in dust in Haiti), filled ourselves with some great Haitian food, and gathered on the outside porch to debrief the events of this past 5 days. I feel like we crammed 3 weeks worth of sights, sounds, emotions, and work into, really, 4 days. We shared for two hours as thoughts or memories or still small voices were brought to our minds, drawn up from the deep well of our hearts.


For most of us Haiti was was we expected but so much more. For most of us we came knowing how it would go and we leave humbled and surprised at the complexities, nuances, tensions, and hidden surprises that make Haiti the ugly beautiful place that it is!


We leave this morning for the airport! We touch down in DC at 5:00 P.M. We’ve backed our bags that we will lug through the airport. We bring our bodies home to our family and friends but for all of us we will leave a part of our hearts in Haiti. May we not forget!
Jon Hand and Pastor Nathan and his wife Olive

Dr. Colestock and his wife dental screenings on the Good Samaritan children


painting the kindergarten table for the Bethanie School of Canaan




Jessie spending time with her sponsor child Loubenson

Monday, January 16, 2012

I often don't have much time to give details while we have a team. Until we have help running the guest house, I've resorted to giving very brief updates and now, posting thoughts from a team member. Which is probably better than what I could describe yesterday to have been like. The following was a post Pastor Jon wrote for the blog to keep members of Engage Community Church informed about the trip that several from their church are on.
Today was a good day! The weather in Hait has been fantastic. We worked outside all morning in the hot Haitian sun. It was in the mid to upper 80s today and yet there is absolutely no humidity as evidenced that I drank 3 liters of water and didn’t sweat one drop. I am NOT used to that!

We left the guesthouse this morning around 9 AM and drove for 40 minutes over to a place called Canaan. Two years ago Canaan was just a pocked mark piece of God-forsaken hardscrabble hillside at the foothills of the majestic mountains that seem to hover over the three sides surrounding Port-Au-Prince. Canaan is about an hour outside of the capital city. After the earthquake the government created a tent city in this barren dusty hillside of crumbled limestone and scrub brush. People living in PAP were told they would be given jobs if they relocated their life outside of the city to start a new life in Canaan. None of it came true. No job materialized, no ‘new life’, just wind, dust, boredom, and a landscape peppered with tattered tents with no electricity or running water. Each ‘house’ looks like a rickety 10×10 shacks of tarp and clanky wind-blown tin. Today over 5000 families live a hard life on this crumbling piece of Haiti. Most of the homes are the size and texture of tool sheds–my back yard storage barn where I keep my push mower is larger than some of these homes.

Through a series of ‘unexplainable’ events Jeff and Deb met Pastor Nathan. Pastor Nathan pastors a church in Delma near PAP. After the earthquake many of his flock were relocated to Canaan. So he went to Canaan and started a church in the middle of the community. Today that church has over 400 people connecting, engaging, and buzzing in the life of Jesus lived out. Each day of the week the wind will blow the sound of ruckus songs of praise flowing wafting from the slats in the windows of the church. Turns out the God forsaken places are not that at all! Last Summer Jeff and a crew of workers from the states put the finishing touches on a 30×70 ft church building. It’s simple, nothing fancy, but probably the most beautiful church building I’ve ever seen not because of color or design….but because of function and place. This church is literally an oasis in the desert-as all churches should be. A place where thirsty souls come out of the heat and ramshackle existence to be refreshed and renewed by the living water of God-His Spirit. A place where love is planted and rooted deep in the lives of the family of God bearing much fruit in a barren land of the living.

Part of our job this morning was to paint and polyurethane the inside of the building. During the week the building is a school for 130 kids from Canaan. Across the rocky dusty yard is an outbuilding that serves as a medical clinic and several from our team offered medical care to 20 people today. One of the girls who showed up came with her older sister. She is three, her name is MeMe. Meme’s mom is sick and pretty much out of the picture. Meme needed her temperature taken but sometime a little girl needs a mommy’s touch more than she needs pills for pain. Over the course of the morning the women in our group passed Meme around as she laid her droopy head on the familiar nurturing shoulders of strangers from America–both hoping for that moment in time to freeze longer than time allowed.

So…among other things…that is what we did. We also put siding on an outdoor kitchen that is being built to feed the community. Right now, people are walking an hour + one way to buy food in a nearby town. Not acceptable!

So that’s what we did. Here is what we learned. The essence of life. The things we clamber for: Joy, well-being, love, contentment, peace, security, happiness, acceptance, community, rested soul, and did I mention JOY? These things we spend billions to buy and, yet, illusively cannot seem to keep. These things of life that make the difference between living and surviving…they are alive here in spades. The stuff of living life well, of being most alive, of all that is most beautiful about life itself…it lives in tool shed shacks with packed dusty dirt floors. It cooks its food over charcoal pits and hikes across town to the nearest watering hole. It follows children as they run and chase and screech turning piles of rocks into sandboxes of play. It gathers in nightly with neighbors in circles around make shift porches to laugh and tell stories. It breaks out across the beaming face of the passerby on the street, um, well more like craggy dirt path.

Back home in our walled compound of cement, razor wire, and metal gates…All of us tonight sat around debriefing our day–amazed. We were amazed because the secrets out! The emperor’s naked. You don’t need life to go well to live well and be fully alive. These people taught the know-it-all Americans how to live today. They exposed our greatest lies and unrelenting quest. More is here and it’s alive and well in hardscrabble Haiti…

Good night friends! May the God of peace be with you. I leave you with this as it’s truth echoed off the limestone walls of the mountainside today!!

6 I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, 17 so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, 18 may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, 19 and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. - Ephesians 3

Thursday, January 12, 2012

Thank you Prayer family!

Thank you so much for all the prayers lifted for Brooke and our family over the last few days. We are so honored to have such a support of people to lift us in time of need!
We see Brooke perking up just a little this morning. It will take days for her to regain her strength, but we are seeing the worst is past us.

We thought we knew what Malaria would "look like", but now we know what it can "look like". We have been blessed to have had such good health in the year and 3 months of living in Haiti and now we are blessed to have had the care available to us that we needed!
Please continue your prayers for Brooke and now for Jacques as well. He began feeling the same symptoms as Brooke two days ago. He also began medication yesterday.
Praying they both regain energy and strength!
Today Team January arrives. Please also pray for their travel and their time in Haiti to be filled with God's presence!

Mesi anpil!!
thank you very much!

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Please continue to pray for our Brooke over the next several days. We went to see Dr. Jen at Heartline Ministries today. Malaria confirmed. We started medicine right away. Hopefully well see a difference in a day or two, but it will probably take a while for her to regain her energy. We will try to balance her care while caring for Team January arriving tomorrow.

thank you again for offering up your prayers!

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Please pray for our little Brooke. She began not feeling well last Thursday with the slightest runny nose, then fever began Thursday afternoon. She started to come around on Sunday after three days of fevers. Monday, her fever spiked again so we started her on antibiotics in the morning. Today was better. She had enough energy to be up and around a few times and she ate a little. Tonight though, her fever is back after 5 doses of antibiotics. Trusting God to heal her little body as she rests tonight. Please pray with us!

We are so thankful for this network of pray-ers!

Sunday, January 8, 2012

Why Awakenings?

I’ve been thinking for a few weeks now about a new title for our blog. I’m one of those people who like some change on a regular basis. Nothing drastic, but moving furniture around occasionally is good, re-organizing the kitchen cabinets sometimes never hurts anyone, changing profile pictures on facebook often. Those are the kinds of changes I like on a regular basis, simple. Having the same blog title for two years was getting a little stale. I really couldn’t come up with something that reflects what our lives are in a word, but after making a list of things we’ve learned, experienced, some key phrases that represent part of our transformation…Awaken is what continues to come to mind.
When we named the ministry, the word Awaken accurately described what happened in our lives at the time. I found a song called Awaken that explains in detail the changes that were taking place in Jeff and I. Cool.
As time has gone on, we continue to be “Awakened”. God continues to reveal himself to us. As He does, we see more and more that this life is about our faithfulness to him. Not our time commitment in Haiti. Not the tangible works we do in Haiti. Not how many houses we build or how many patients we see. It’s simply about being faithful each and every day to what God has in store for us and how he wants to use us for His glory. It’s in being faithful that we are able to DO. We are able to build houses and do medical clinics. It’s in time of complete surrender and faithfulness, we see Him most.
In our last medical clinic, I was playing the role of pharmacist. The part of the job I liked most on this particular day was with the children coming in to be seen. We had a team that was supposed to be doing a children’s program, but some circumstances changed and we decided it best to only do the medical clinic that was planned. Because of that, we had tons of crackers to give out to kids coming in to the clinic. I had the pleasure of holding little ones and spoiling them with crackers and lollipops while their parents were seen. Who doesn’t like a lady giving out such goodies even if she has weird white skin?? Well there are a few that refuse no matter how many good treats are offered. In fact, there are a few that cry and won’t even open their eyes because of the white lady in front of them.
The last family to come into the clinic that day was a young mom, Marie Josee, with a little boy about 6 years old and a little girl who was just 7 months old. When their exams were finished, I walked over to them to give my new little friend a pack of crackers. The doctor explained to me that Marie Josee used to be a Christian, but is not anymore and that he was going to let me “handle this one”.
I crouched down in front of this young mom and began talking with her about her life…what was it like before? Now? Why was it different now? Was she happy with her life now? I had many questions for her, just trying to understand the choice she made and the choices she is making daily. I had no earthy advise for this mother who is willing to “do what it takes to provide food for my little boy”. These words mean something completely different here. I don’t know what it is like not to be able to feed my children. The word prostitution is different here. It just is. It's not different biblically. I’m not saying I think it is ok, but it’s hard to argue aside from a biblical standpoint...where she was coming from. From one mother to another…what would I do if I couldn’t feed my children and had no one to help me. Would I make the same choices? I can judgmentally say “no” I wouldn’t, but no matter how bad it gets in the states, there’s always a better way to provide. There's another option. In Haiti there’s no government supported program. There’s no Wendy’s or Sheetz to work at. There’s no homeless shelter giving out meals. In Haiti, there’s faith. That’s it.
Suddenly, everyone else in the room disappeared. I had no words. Then, God began to whisper to Dr. B. Our God is faithful. Our God is gracious and he loves us at all times. Dr. B shared this with her.
Then God whispered to me. “Remember 15 years ago when Jeff read Romans 5 and 6 to you as you talked about My faithfulness and grace.” I was yet again AWAKENED. Faith has to be enough. I shared those verses with her. As we shared God’s word, God’s love, and God’s grace with her, the tears came. God was moving in her heart as Dr. B and I encouraged her, loved her, and shared God’s love for her even though…
We prayed with her and she left with a Bible in her hand and the knowledge that God loves her. Please pray for God to continue to stir in the heart of this young mom. She has some tough choices to make every day. I pray she experiences a faith that is enough.
…AWAKENINGS…God continues to show himself, his faithfulness, and the broken around us. It’s through Him we try to live a life of significance. It’s by His power we can live a life that demands an explanation. It’s for Him we try to live a life “Wide Awake”.

Monday, January 2, 2012

Thank you! Team December 2011

To simply list the things the team DID while they were here would not do the week we just experienced justice. Sure, we did some construction type stuff at the Good Samaritan Boys home that needed to be done. We ran physicals on all the Good Samaritan children. We taught a children’s bible story, played games and celebrated in Canaan. We offered medical care for many in the community we are working with in Canaan. Those things are all great and many people were blessed because of that.
But…there’s more. 32 Orphans received letters from sponsors. 32 children received loved from 13 team members who left their jobs and families to come see them! This team was part of a healing process in 6 children who recently were taken from dire situations (but the only thing they knew) and placed in a new home. Approximately 130 children in Canaan got to have a day focused on them. A day to color, play, and sing. A special needs child was loved, an example set for many. Many people had an opportunity to not only have medical care, but also encouragement and prayer.
And it still doesn’t stop there.
This week was not only about Americans ministering to Haitians. This team walked away feeling blessed to have loved. They saw God in the smiles of the children. They experienced faith like never before in a visit to Suzette. They were encouraged by the strength and resiliency of the Haitian people. Some saw what it looks like to seek and find God “outside the box”.
Again leaves me wondering WHO was blessed more?
Thank you Team December 2011 for blessing those we love, our family, and our ministry with your time and love!