Ruthless Belief

        

        

        The hate in his eyes took my breath away. I have never wanted to crawl out of my skin so badly. A few men started yelling in my direction and I averted my eyes and kept walking, willing myself to become invisible. It was an eery, creeping thing that I started to feel with their hot stares, something so strange to be felt. It was a directed, pointed kind of hate.
A few mornings later Jimmy hurries towards me and takes my hands. “I’m going to try and make it to the police station now.”
He smiled reassuringly and I tried to mask the tears burning against my eyes as he whispered he loved me and rode off on that motorcycle. I shut the rickety doors to the house and dissolved into a bewildered and overwhelmed mess.

   Jesus, why did you let this happen?

Rioting. Burning. Shooting. Attacks. I tried not to imagine what Jimmy may come across on the road. I felt the long swallow in my lungs as I thought about the risks he was taking in order to try and protect me.

For days I asked Jesus where he was, and for days I asked when he was going to act for me. But now…now I began to wonder what it meant if he did not.

I was in a world of red earth and falling rain, of spending days walking miles in the treeless mountains, holding newborns and meeting with families suffering from the hurricane. I was back in the Grand Anse region, racing against sunlight, and shivering as the night wind slithered through the cracks in the walls.
We were back to continue with the housing project and our days were full of working out the plans for 34 houses. It was supposed to be a trip filled with progress and hope and preparation. And it was. 

But underneath it all was a fresh, new kind of fear I had yet to feel before.

 










    It was ironic really, having a heavily sought after politician arrested by the US government on the very same day I unknowingly decided to travel to his hometown.
His arrest lead to attacks and violence against Americans and other foreigners in the region. People barricaded the roads, we were stuck, and the information from the outside began to pour in.
“Stay in the house.”
“Don’t go out.”

“You have to find a way out of there.”
After a week of waiting for things to calm down, we started to hear the whispers and questioning of why our house hadn't been burnt down yet, and so we decided to go to the police to help us get out. After a long 12 hours of being passed off to different Haitian riot police and UN soldiers at every checkpoint, we finally made it to a neighboring city. The day after that, we arrived home and I fell upon my bed, wondering why God even let that happen at all.

Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. matthew 10:16

When something hard happens in your life, maybe even something terrible, the thing that everyone always tells you is to just trust God. And this is the understanding that God promises to protect you, that everything will be okay, that He will work everything out, and you don’t need to be afraid.

This was the way I have trusted God. In Romans, He promises to work everything for my good, and I have held on to those words for years and years.

But this year, these last few months even, I have learned something different about what it means to trust God. It was a hard truth to process through, a part in faith that I think we never seem to get to because it is the part in faith that seems like it is too far, too extreme.

I moved to Haiti twice. First, the thought to be permanent, and the second, the actual permanent. The first time I moved to Haiti- I moved to the unknown- where I knew no one at all, where no one spoke my language, and I was caged inside an orphanage with all of its abuse and neglect and suffering.
The second time I moved to Haiti was permanent in my own apartment- with no security, no high walls, no car, and little connections.
In both times, so many called me stupid and naive. Others called me brave. But looking back on those decisions four years later, I realize I was neither.

What I was, was scared. I was so scared to do this thing without so many people supporting me- to move in with strangers, to have to figure out how to survive, to have to take risks, and to feel like a child who doesn’t know how to function in a place so different.

I heard the stories, heard the voices telling me not to do this. Mine was one of them after all.

But this is what God was telling me to do, and so I trusted Him, and I went.

I wasn’t brave, there was something about the way I trusted God that somehow missed the mark of what bravery entailed.

Bravery: the admirable quality of being able to confront frightening things; the quality of having or showing mental or moral strength to face danger, fear, or difficulty.

When I moved to Haiti, I trusted God to protect me, I believed in the cliché that the safest place for me to be is in the center of God’s will.

But back then, I forgot I was a sheep and that there were wolves. That sometimes sheep escape, and sometimes sheep just don’t.

It was as if I trusted God to keep me out of danger, that he would let no harm befall me, that because I trust Him, He would work everything out for my good.

But I think all of these years, I have misread that verse in Romans.

And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. Romans 8:28

It never says He will work everything out for my good in this short lifetime of mine. It’s as if now, when I read that verse, I get this feeling that this verse isn’t even talking about me. It’s talking about us, it’s talking about the whole world.

It wasn’t for Peter’s good to be crucified, wasn’t for Stephen’s good to be stoned to death. It wasn’t for Jesus’s good that he was pierced, and beaten, and hung like a butchered animal on the cross.
But it was for our good. Our good.

My trust in God was limited, and I was not brave. I wanted God to work things out always for my good, not for our good. Bravery, true bravery, is when you face and accept all of the possible dangers and frightening things and do it anyways. Bravery is being scared and doing it anyways- not because you believe that God will keep the terrible from happening, but because you know He will always do what is good for the world.

I looked at my watch. 8:50 pm. Jimmy was never late, and if he was, he always called to let me know. Five minutes later my phone rang.

“Hey, I’m coming…I had an accident.”
A police car pulled up to the house shortly after and my heart started to race at seeing the flashing lights.

I started to say his name and lost my words as I saw the blood covering his clothes and the cloth held to his face.

When we got to the hospital, a lump formed in  my throat as he removed the cloth to reveal a deep hole dug in his face. That lump stayed for hours in the hospital, and then after as I washed the blood from his body and stains from his clothes. The lump stayed for days after, as I imagined and dreamed of him suddenly collapsing from an untreated head injury.

This was the fifth near-death experience in a single year for this boy of mine. Three accidents, an unfortunate incident of getting caught in a riot, and another of begin held at gunpoint by a couple of thieves. The fifth was suddenly too much.

For years I said that I would never marry. I had my excuses and I never committed, never allowed myself to love someone in that way.

Getting married used to be my biggest fear, and yet now I had a whole new one to work with.

Here I was, sitting outside the hospital, waiting for the doctor to stitch up this boy’s face, this boy that I never meant to love, to whom I would marry in a few months. And I was terrified, so terrified of losing the life I now valued over my own.

There was something about this moment that brought me back to when I was hiding in a house in the Grand Anse.

There is something about intense fear that brings us into a deeper commitment to Jesus.

In the past year, I have come from a trust in God that used to only think for my good, to a trust in God that chooses to continue finding my hope in Him even when He doesn’t answer in a way that is good for me.

Over the past year I have pleaded with God to save friendships that weren’t saved, asked God to end the suffering in the orphanages where I visit, and to protect families affected by the hurricane. 

It’s a year later and those friendships ended, the suffering in those orphanages continue, and a little baby died from becoming sick from the living conditions after the hurricane.

God brought me safely out of the Grand Anse, and He has kept my fiancé safe and alive this year.

It’s hard to know why God chooses what He chooses, but He remains God and I remain not. If it was up to me, I would choose all that’s best for me, all that’s best for what my eyes can see for this period of time. I would always choose to remain close to my friends, for those orphanages to be shut down, for that little baby to live. But I am not God and cannot see. I cannot see that if by separating from my friends we will actually be able to lead healthier lives and do more for the world, I cannot see that if by those orphanages remaining open they might reveal a deeper, larger problem to prevent them, I cannot see what that baby might have had to live through if that’s what God chose.
I don’t think it’s ever God’s plan for friends not to reconcile, or for children to suffer, or for babies to die. But because of sin, He uses even the ugliest, hardest of things to do good for us. Us, us the world.

 




            I have learned that trusting God is nothing less then ruthless belief. That when it’s dark and the light doesn’t appear, when it hurts and relief doesn’t come, when it fails and the reason isn’t there, love and faith grow even more. 

Jesus begged God to not have to go to the cross, he cried out, asked God pleadingly why He had forsaken him. But Jesus remained obedient. Bloody, broken apart, humiliated, stripped off all that once was his, alone and separated from God. 

That is ruthless belief, a kind of love and trust in God that can seem unbearable. It is a trust that rips you apart and breaks your heart. One that has us crawling on our knees just to get through it.

I was driving somewhere in Pennsylvania last month, thinking about all of these things when this cheesy Christian song came on the radio, literally just echoing the entirety of all that was in my head.

I know you’re able and I know you can

Save through the fire with your mighty hand

But even if you don't 

My hope is you alone

I know the sorrow, and I know the hurt

Would all go away if You’d just say the word

But even if you don't

My hope is You alone.

I have cried these words a lot this year. I have cried these words too.

When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,

When sorrows like sea billows roll;

Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say,

It is well, it is well with my soul.

This, this is ruthless belief. This is surely what it means to trust Jesus. Because my anxiety, my sorrow, my hurt, all that which I have gone through in the past few years, it all seems to come to these moments where my hands are up and my heart feels finished. Where I am crying from all the pain inside, asking God for the strength to sing it is well with me. That somehow when Jesus is walking beside us, even the pain and suffering which befalls us has us falling more deepy in love with the kind of God He is.

The kind of God I follow walks with me. He is the kind of God that longs to romance me and wrap me up in kindness and sweet things. He is the one who promises me to a land flowing with milk and honey. He is the God who wants nothing more then my love, the God who makes His home within me, who’s voice is in my mind, pleading me to choose the light and all that is good. He is the kind of God who died a horrible death. He is the kind of God worth following.

It is He who gives me strength to sing that it is well. It is He who I follow into the flame and sorrow. It is He who works all things for our good. It is He who gives me every reason to trust.

When Jimmy got down on one knee and asked me to marry him, it was one of my greatest fears coming to life.

Marriage. The commitment I never wanted to make. Fear after fear raced in my thoughts as Jimmy waited for my answer.
He asked me soon after we returned from the Grand Anse, in a grassy land in a voodoo influenced area where we work with five families.I couldn’t seem to look at him, instead I looked out at the vast valleys and rolling hills of Saut D’eau. And I felt God beside me, just loving me, his love overpowering me.

And then I said yes. Yes, in a tongue that is foreign from my own, in a place that used to feel so strange and different, to a man that used to be a stranger a few years ago.
The thing about perfect love is that it casts out fear, and I’m not talking about Jimmy’s love. Jimmy was just as scared of marriage as I was.
But God’s love is so perfect that it casts the fear out of our lives so that we can trust Him to do what He asks, to do good for the world and for each other.
Sometimes we are afraid to get married. Sometimes we fear for our life. Sometimes we fear for their life. Sometimes we fear the fire, and sometimes we fear the good and wonderful things.

But God is there, waiting for us to trust Him entirely, so that He can use our lives, whether in beauty or sorrow, to make all things good for the world.

And He will give us the strength that lies in the confines of our hearts to be brave, and to sing it is well, it is well with my soul.

Cause for Joy

         

         I heard his voice coming out of the telephone, but it felt like I was drifting far away.
        “I woke up to the wailing coming from their house,” he said, “It was so loud, Courtney.”

       Heartbreak was something that I could suddenly physically feel. I could feel it there, my heart beginning to break apart in my core.
        I thought of her, little baby Fosemone. 13 months old and so much life yet to behold and live. 13 months old and taken by an unrelenting rainy season in a hurricane-shredded place.
        “We’re too late,”I whispered at the voice coming out of my phone. “We’re too late,” I sobbed and thought of the new house we had just finished building for her family.
        I roamed through the rooms of my parent’s house in Pennsylvania until I fell against my mom. The miles and ocean separating me from Haiti suddenly felt unbearably far. I had never felt so far from home.

     I had thought I was busy in August and September, traveling and organizing and meeting with families to set up schooling and start up some smalls way to jumpstart some income for them. I was busy. But then October came, and with it, hurricane Matthew.
     Port-au-Prince was relatively untouched, as if nothing had passed over Haiti at all. But then reports from the South started leaking in, and I began to cry and ache for days for people whom I did not know, and friends I had yet to hear from.
      “Look at this.” Someone handed Jimmy their phone. He looked at pictures of the Grand Anse region, pictures of where so many of his family members live, where he spent so much of his childhood.
       I watched his face fall and then give me a look as if to say, “Let’s go.”
        So we did.

     The next few weeks became a non-stop rush at finding supplies and searching for things like tarps for some temporary relief.
     Our days in Palmis were long and exhausting, and arriving there was journey enough. We would go walking every day under the maddening downpours, searching out how friends and families had fared.
       Elderly women with broken bones, newborns without roofs over their heads, the blind being robbed of what remained. I remember walking past a man well into his advanced years. He just sat there on the ground, staring at his home and gardens and trees in disbelief. There was something about seeing total loss in a person’s eyes, something that makes forgetting impossible.        

       I tried to imagine his home as he probably was. Lush and green- in the most fruitful of areas in Haiti. His house, his gardens and livelihood all gone in a matter of hours.

       One afternoon, by the time we had made it to Jimmy’s aunt and uncle’s, it was already beginning to pour. We all hurried under the small tarp covering some of their belongings. I watched as his cousin wrapped her baby boy tight against her chest. We looked at the wreckage of their house. Jimmy held his head in his hands and cried.
       

    

        “Don’t rush through your pain.” My mentor and friend told me when I arrived back to the States for a few weeks. She is always saying things like that, annoyingly hard and good things that I need to hear. “Maybe you need to start asking what God is trying to do through all of your pain.”
       I had decided to come back to the States at last minute because I was all broken apart. Every day had become a day spent in tears, it was a new, foreign kind of sadness. A new kind of broken. Joy was always something I have breathed. Joy was natural, something easy and familiar to my nature. But not now.

      

       Come get me, I began to beg God. Come get me. 

       

I felt like I was drowning in sadness, in my heart aching, in my being ravaged by hurt. I kept having to experience other's pain, and yet was unable to even handle my own pain from what I have been through this year. Each day seemed to bring some new hard thing to go through, and I began to feel buried in it all.

       

    

  

   

       Joy seemed like an unattainable thing now. How could I offer up my heart to Jesus with it being such a sad and lonely and ugly place? I knew Jesus wanted to be invited into my mess, but I didn't know how. Sadness seemed to replace all of the areas of my life where God's presence had always so abundantly filled up before. And I missed Him, I missed feeling Him right there, missed being able to talk with Him, and walk with Him, and spend my time with Him. But shame controlled my life. I was so ashamed to be struggling with such pain and sadness, ashamed to be so low.

        I didn't want to be such a wreck of a girl. I was ashamed to be unable to share in the fun my family wanted to have with me being back, ashamed to admit that I was overwhelmed and hurting in front of churches, ashamed that my boyfriend had to keep taking care of me in sickness and walking alongside of me in my sorrow. I felt such shame every time I met up with friends and supporters and burst into tears.

       But it was these very people who began to show me how to let God into my hurting heart.

       

    For I will satisfy the weary soul and every languishing soul I will replenish.

                                                          Jeremiah 31:25

        Talk and pray with those who breathe life into you, and Courtney, say yes to all that breathes life into you. My "second-mom" said softly and firmly to me a few hours after I received news of Fosemone's death. She looked into my eyes, into the mess of my soul, and reminded me that I need love. That receiving love, God's love, is the most important thing we can do in life, without receiving love first, we are unable to give love at all.  It was in that moment that I began to remember what it is like to receive God's love from the most obvious of places: other people.

         

       Other people keep our souls alive, just like food and water does with our body. -Donald Miller

       

 It was the very people that I had felt so ashamed in front of, that made me remember to let myself be loved. 

       It was my family, listening and searching out the hard things I have held inside for so long, prodding me to speak and be heard. It was my church, in the way they listen to you with not only their ears, but with their spirits, encouraging you, uplifting you, reminding you of the way Jesus so hears us. It was my boyfriend, running miles to get a small thing of relief in my sickness. When all I feel is alone, he reminds me that I am actually not, that he is incessantly and continually there for me. It was my friends, making me smile- the smallest form of joy, and the way each has walked alongside of me in such important and strange ways.

      And really, the only thing that each of them are doing is loving me as Jesus. Searching my heart, listening in spirit, walking beside me, and just being there for me. I have never seemed to realize that I am indeed supposed to be loved by others in the same way I am supposed to love others.

     On the cross, Jesus held the guilt and remorse of the world, the despair and ruin of every soul, the wickedness of every heart, and the darkness of every sin. Most of my life, I have focused on how Jesus physically suffered for us, but now I have begun to realize the even heavier burden in which he bore. A burden so great that his Father, the one true God, actually turned away from him. Jesus became utterly alone in the world as we will never be.

      God is always with us, but on the cross, Jesus felt total separation from God. Jesus sacrificed what was actually the only thing that matters- being with God.

  
        In this long year, I keep thinking about this moment- this moment where Jesus becomes alone, where he experiences being betrayed and his closest friends abandoning him, where he has to watch his mother weep for him, where he has to choose to bear unbearable pain. The emotional pain of Jesus is a blaring truth to me that he is the only one who is able to bear such pain and suffering, it is as if when I look at the cross, Jesus is looking right at me, out of so much love and longing, saying,

Let me be God.

Don't take my place.

Don't bear that which you cannot.

You are not capable as I am.

          It is in this moment where I realize that I am actually unable to handle my pain and sorrow, because although I strive to be like him, I am not him. 

          "...Thus says the Lord, 'The people who survived the sword found grace in the wilderness, when Israel sought for rest, the Lord appeared to him from far away, I have loved you with an everlasting love, therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you, again I will build you'..." 

       

 I have been endlessly reading this passage in Jeremiah where God promises to turn Israel's mourning to joy. I feel like my whole life this year is inside of this chapter. Sometimes I think it's tempting to not write something until you get some sort of closure, some way to end a story, some final thing that closes a part of what you are going through. No one wants to tell a story without a good end, but sometimes, I think we are supposed to tell our stories in the midst of figuring it out, right in the middle of it all.

        

 This year had been all sword in my life, attack after attack, trial and another trial waiting it, and I have lived through it. For so many months, I have felt so lost in this wilderness-kind of confusion, of not knowing how to praise God even though he has brought me out from under the sword, in not knowing how to find joy again. But I have found grace, and God has appeared every time I search for Him. He has so loved me, has been so faithful in all of my struggling.

         Since returning back to Haiti, we have decided to take the month of December to rest from our work in Palmis, where we are working on rebuilding homes from the hurricane. Jimmy and I had both gotten so sick at different points that we had begun to think I had malaria, and he himself had to go on IV for a day.

        

        December has been full of good things- of birthdays and weddings, of celebration and Christmas. It has been a month of letting joy leak into my body, and learning to receive love from people, and learning to choose all that breathes life into my life.

        

         In that chapter in Jeremiah, God goes on to talk about the joy that He will once again restore in His people, the way they will sing and languish no more. He says He will turn their mourning for joy, and will comfort them, and give them gladness for sorrow. 

       

               The other day I went walking in Santo to where my favorite mango tree stands, and the goats all walk home together when the sun begins to lie down. While I was there I kept thinking about what I had heard from a Haitian speaking on Jeremiah, he kept using the phrase, "mete pye w' ate." Put your feet on the ground. For some reason, these words remind me of how I am to find joy. I am to choose it, to place myself in it, to put my feet on the ground and walk, and do something about it. I am to let others love me, and I am to love others, and I will find joy in doing both. I need to mete pye m' ate and look at my friends, who struggle with joy because they can't provide for their kids, or don't have the money to get married, or can't sign their own names. I need to walk with my friends who have lost everything in a storm, friends who have lost a baby without warning...

      

        I am to be a cause for joy in their lives, just as so many have been the cause for joy in mine. 

       Jesus in our cause for joy. He is in you. He is in me. And we are never alone.

         

He Remembers Me.

        

 I was a zombie coming home from the orphanage. My limbs were heavy, my body felt like a stone. I had held her skeleton body on the motorcycle in the darkness, I could hear her whimpering as every bump in the road jolted her bones against me.
         We made it back home and I escaped to the bathroom for a minute. My entire being was aching with sickness, and I wanted to crawl onto my mattress and forget it all. I breathed and I breathed.
I was okay, I made it through, I willed my body to act like I was strong.

        She had no name, just a faraway look in her eyes and a scowl forever resting on her lips. I bathed her, and she cried from having to hold herself up. I dressed her, grabbed a diaper, and gave her a little soup. And then went back out into the night to hunt for some medicine
Relief trickled in as I watched her drink down some medicine, and keep down most of the soup. I watched her drift off to sleep, and soon the house was silent.
It wasn’t until the water in the shower started pouring over me that I fell apart. Water can wash away all of the dirt, and fecies, and dust, and foul smells away. But not the hurt, never the hurt. 

           I am Moses. I am Moses- the one God chooses and I can’t understand  it. I am Moses- the reluctant one, the one who isn’t adequate, the one who argues with God to ask someone else instead. I am the one He chooses to love anyways, the one He asks nonetheless.

When Moses was born, God used his mom to save him, He was with him before he could even walk.
My mom always tells me that when she was pregnant with me, she would think of Hannah and Samuel, and she would pray Hannah’s words over her belly. She would give me back to the Lord once I was born.
I think the first time she told me that was the first time I came back from Haiti.
It’s strange realizing that I have known Jesus all of my life, that in the earliest of my memories I can remember Him being my friend. 

For the past few months I have thought of Moses- as he looked upon the pain of his people- at their misery, and slavery, the very thing that led him to murder. And besides the murder part, this has been my own reality.
Suffering, hopelessness, pain. I have looked upon my people, my friends, ones I dearly love, and I have watched them walk in that.
One of my closest friends was electrocuted and broke his shoulder, and after getting an X-ray, the doctor gave him some pain killers and sent him home. Each time I visited the orphanage in the rainy season, the mosquitos would come, the kind that aren’t just annoying. The kind that hurt. The kids start crying when dusk came. A mother I know, spent over a year coughing until she threw up, every day. One exam later, and tuberculosis was named.
Several meetings with Social services later, the orphanages remained the same, unchecked, unmonitored, full of misery.
I received some funds- enough funds to send at least 25 children to school in the families I work with. I was relieved and excited- for once I didn’t have to wonder where I would get the funding I needed. And then I had to give it all away for another need, and I was suddenly in need of thousands of dollars again.

         I met Louisna many months ago. Her house was open to people to see in, her children went place to place, scavenging for food, her husband died from alcoholism, and she was 8 months pregnant. Louisna never went to school, can’t write her last name, and her sons weren’t going to school. This was her situation, but this isn’t Louisna.
I love Louisna.
She lives in Jerizalém, which used to be a tent city after the earthquake, but now is a city of dust and tin and cement. Louisna works hard. She is brave, and beautiful, and even though she can’t provide for her children, she loves them in a way that I haven’t seen a lot of here.
She loves me in ways that continue to surprise me. She has never taken advantage of me, not in the smallest ways that she could. She is upright, and tender-hearted.
We decided to rebuild Louisna’s house, and the entire time, I kept thinking of Hannah. I thought of Hannah weeping bitterly to the Lord in her anguish, calling out in her pain and grief. And how the Lord remembered her.
I hear those words every time I’m with Louisa. He remembers you. He remembers you.

          I didn’t know how far along she was, she never went to the doctor. One day, I gave her money for her to get a sonography, little did I know, I was actually paying for the midwife to deliver her baby safely the next day.
Now she has a house with privacy, her baby girl is healthy and growing, her youngest son is in school, and her oldest son is in an accelerated program to finish school more quickly.
God sees Louisna. He remembers her. He remembers me too.

          The past six months might have been the hardest six months of my life. My heart became torn up from anxiety and stress, my soul became weary with discouragement and hurt. So many relationships have changed, so many transitions have been made, so many hard choices have been had. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, for the first time in my life, I felt too skinny.
I never questioned God’s goodness. I could see the darkness and hard times for what they were, but it was as if I was just walking in the dark, knowing that God is there, but not knowing what to do with myself as I was walking.

          I would walk past baby aisles in stores, wondering over my little baby Moses that I haven’t seen in 9 months. I would cling to Nickenson at the orphanage, crying over him every time I came. I started searching for doctors for my friend with the broken shoulder, and started to wonder where I would find $5,000 to pay for his surgery or who would agree to do it. I could feel Satan attacking me where it hurt the most, I could see how he was trying to destroy and ruin. Amidst the hard things, things started to happen that made me dare to hope. I became terrified of hope, knowing how quickly it ransacks my heart and takes over. 

It was like I knew God was there, He was there watching me and He was there with me. But I didn’t know what exactly it was that He wanted me to do.
   In March, as my best friend started to watch life suddenly become hard for me, he told me that God is letting all this happen, he is breaking apart what needs to be, so that what is best can be before me. It was so simple, but it stuck, and I couldn’t get it out of my head. And I knew it deep in my heart- seeing Jesus even then felt familiar, I knew He was working on my behalf, that He was fighting for my good, and that when He does that, it is usually painful and hard.
But what was I supposed to do while He did that?
Yes, be faithful. Yes, trust Him. But I was missing something.
It wasn’t until July that I knew what it was. 

“Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice insofar as you share in Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed. If you are insulted for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you…therefore let those who suffer according to God’s will entrust their souls to a faithful Creator while doing good.” 1 Peter 4

        I was supposed to praise him in the dark. 

       When my heart is all out and exposed, and all that is inside it hurts, I am supposed to thank Him. When I don’t understand, when I’m supposed to trust Him, I’m supposed to thank Him. When I’m taken advantage of and used or feel as if God isn’t answering, when someone betrays me or lies to me, when I feel nothing but despair for someone’s life, I am to rejoice.

Through a lot of work, and time, God provided the $5,000 surgery for my friend for $1. My friend’s mom is taking medicine for her TB, and is doing much better, and the skeleton child spent a month and a half recovering in a clinic for malnutrition. Her name is Marie Andre, and she smiles now. My best friend who reminded me of God’s presence in my life got baptized a few months ago, something I had been praying for since I moved down here. God provided the thousands of dollars I needed to send all of those children to school in a matter of weeks, and then added some more. Three of which I have been desperately praying would be taken out of the orphanage I lived in. For three years I had prayed for that to happen. Three years later, God has answered me. Three years later, He remembers me.

        I have walked through the dark, and God has brought me out, but that doesn’t mean that after what’s hard, everything is made right. Suffering continues, heartache remains, and pain lives on. With no legal paperwork, Marie Andre had to go back to the orphanage, I still have to wave goodbye to my family at the airport, sickness rages on, families are still very much in need, kids are still trapped in a corrupt system, and ones I love get held at gunpoint in the streets. It’s still dark out.
But I have learned to praise God in the dark, and to thank Him for what is hard. I have learned a new kind of love from this, a maddening kind of trust in Him. A trust that is a fierce, struck-down, seizure kind of force on your body. I think when you feel hopeless and you remember that you are remembered, and understand the impossible way He evidently loves you, it does that to you- enraptures you.
Beautiful things are seen in the darkness- like the moon and the stars and the silhouettes of trees. Friends get married, ones you love choose to follow Jesus, and you get to see a little more of the world. Moments become more beautiful when they are cherished in the hard times.
  

       I want to start closing my eyes more. When I pray, when I sing, when I don’t have words. When I close my eyes, the world goes dark, and somehow the communion I have with Jesus deepens. He is there, in the darkness, in what is hard. 

                      The whole land went dark when Jesus died. It was a place of great suffering and death and gruesome things. But life came after, salvation came after. Hope arose, and He made all things right and good.

       

         

       Maybe when it's dark, we are just supposed to bind our hands to the cross, praise the One working on our behalf, and ask for the strength to do what is hard and the bravery to do what is good.

       I will be like Moses, I will reluctantly say yes and I will face the darkness in the world. I will be like Hannah, I will pray, and I will rejoice, and God will remember me. 

       And I will be like Louisna, I will be brave, and I will love, even when I don't have. I will love, because again and again, He surprises me. He is kind to me. He remembers me.

Marie Andre

Getting the surgery!

Man of Sorrows

      I had been away for over a month, the longest span of time I had been away from Haiti in a while. After weeks in America, and a week in England, my being so deeply ached to return to the little ones I knew were waiting on me. The day after I landed, I sped to the orphanage, expecting the excited hellos, the mob of endless rejoicing of being together again, the shouting of each other's names...
      But I stepped back in the orphanage and it was silent. There was no mob and no cheering. No smiles and no excitement. All of the kids were sleeping, sprawled out all over the floors. The place was terribly dirty, the floors were covered in filth, in human waste, and a foul smell filled the rooms. And they were sleeping on those floors, walking barefoot on those floors.
      Three of the girls ran up to me and clung to me. "I missed you" they said quietly, but there was no joy in their voices. We just stood like that for a long time, as I felt them sigh against my chest.
 
  Slowly they started to wake up, and more of my dear little friends ran up to me, and there was something in the way their eyes were set, something of hurt, something sad. Precious ears, scalps, and limbs covered in oozing sores and scabies came to find me.
       One by one they wake up, and I begin to remember, I begin to remember what is real.
       A reality where Wendi pulls his mask up and tries to shut himself off from everyone, where Rezinald, usually so energetic, is crying simply because he is sad, where Nickenson vomits his entire meal because he was made to eat so much, where Gaelle closes her eyes and tries not to touch her shaved, blistering head.
      Megan and I left as the sun was setting, and we said nothing for the three taptap rides home. I returned home, and instead of returning with the joy of being reunited, I returned with a gaping hurt in my chest.

       For months I have been thinking through and struggling with the fact that Jesus was a man of sorrows, that he was acquainted with grief.
       And it was like as soon as I started to wonder what that meant, to think about those things, he started showing me.
   

For months now I have been wrestling with sorrow, have been struggling with a grief deep-set inside me. It was like I was suddenly becoming painfully aware of how all of the things that have been etched into my heart from years of working in the midst of injustice, pain, and suffering, were finally affecting me. I started struggling with stress and anxiety, things more foreign to me than how Haiti used to feel.
      The fact is there is just so much suffering, and sometimes, just not a lot you can do about it all. I became so discouraged, so brokenhearted from it all.
      I started feeling small, so incredibly more than just inadequate, but of realizing that it would be impossible for me to fill the role God has been laying before me.

     This weird thing happened where I woke up one day and realized that God had answered every one of my prayers, and I mean every prayer. I started shrinking into myself, I started feeling unworthy, unable, and terrified. I started warring with God to not become the person he wants me to be.
     Suddenly I couldn't handle the pressure of having so many wonderful people rooting for me, supporting and encouraging me. So much love, kindness, and hope was being set on my back and it felt as if it was stifling me, as if I couldn't think from the weight of it all. It was just too much for my spirit to handle.
     I started listening to a voice in my life, a voice telling me I was worthless, that I'm nothing, and that I am not someone usable. That I have nothing to offer the kingdom.
     I had never listened to such voices before, but now I couldn't seem to get it out of my head, and stop it from leaking into my heart.
 



 It was a dark place, a dark place of letting someone else define who I was, of letting hurtful things sink into my being, of feeling so vulnerable and hurt that it started to affect the way I simply exist each day.

      Courtney, God is good. God is so good in fact that you can pray your little prayers, the feeble things that they are, and expect Him to do it. But the thing is, you can't think like Him, you can't even bear to behold His thoughts. You can't expect Him not to do more than you ask. 
      Know that all of those feelings you are feeling are real. You are small. You are incompetent. You don't have the wisdom you need. You are not able. That's the whole point. You can't even do what you want because what you want isn't enough. God wants something bigger and you have to deal with it.
      That hurting in your heart- that you aren't enough, that you cannot do this, that you have no worth? Let yourself know it, let yourself know that it's true. Become less, and He will become more through your life, and He will satisfy all of the hurt in your heart. It's going to be embarrassing because everyone is going to see your sin, and realize the truth that you have nothing to offer. Don't try and hide it. Let everyone know it. Be vulnerable. Let everyone see how you are nothing, and how incredible God is. Don't get in the way. Don't pretend anything.

    I wrote that months ago, and only one thing has made it possible for me to begin listening to those words, to not remain lost in the hurt in my heart, and in the overwhelming effects of unabated suffering.

The Lord your God is in your midst

a mighty one who will save

he will rejoice over you with gladness

he will quiet you by his love

he will exult over you with loud singing.

                                Zephaniah 3:17

      How God loves me frustrates my ways. The way in which He does it lures me into changing, into wanting to fight for what is good and right and best. How He loves me has me agreeing to surrender to becoming who He wants me to be, and what He wants me to do. How He loves me silences the farthest reach of my heart.
      I am so sure of the way that He loves me, not in the sense that I understand it, but that I have come to accept the unbelievable as my normal, as this is how He loves me at all times. The love of Jesus is steady. Even when His voice seems quiet and His hands feel closed, his love is steady.
      Jesus knew sorrow deeply, he was known for it. And yet Jesus continually spoke of great joy, and great change. He prods me to not just understand sorrow, to be well aquatinted with grief, but to also experience full joy and change that baffles me.
     Every Saturday we have this odd group of people come to the house- my students, motorcycle driver, good friends and their families, our neighbors, even our landlord. We spend the morning just reading the Bible together, and talking about Jesus.
     Each morning I get to watch Yvenante walk out the door and go to school, a dream that she whispered to me almost three years ago. Every day I get to see Yvenante with her child, together. I not only get to see Jesus keep their family together, but I get to be part of it.
     Every week I get to teach my students English and get to watch God grow those conversations deeper than just talking about a language. I get to watch children stay with their parents and go to school. More beautifully so, I get to watch as my friends help others, as they start pleading their cause. I get to watch them fight for those who need, give out of their own pockets, open up their homes, stand up for ones who need a voice and an advocate.

      There is such deep, deep joy here, in seeing Jesus' steady love pulse in and out of each day. Sorrow, injustice, and suffering are across the world. And that's why we have to be in the world. We have to reap good. We have to bring relief and comfort. We need to bring joy and love to ones who know great suffering and much sorrow.

   It's weird how "to look" and "to see" have the same action, but hold such different meanings, that when you look at or for something, there is a reason and intention in that, but when you see something, something is coming into sight that you weren't looking for.
    Through all of this strange wrestling and struggling, I haven't been searching for hope in it all. I haven't looked for it. But regardless of me not looking for it, God keeps making me see hope everywhere.

    I have seen hope in Caille a l'eau, on a tiny little island not even on the map, as I'm walking wearily beside the shore as Yvenante's uncle throws coconuts out of the trees and tells me about his life and his hope for his family.
 
I have seen hope as I walk through Jerizal ém with Jimmy as he stretches his hand towards a woman's house, a widow that he knows is struggling to take care of her children. He starts talking excitedly about fixing her house up, about sending her children to school, and trying to figure out ways to help her get back on her feet. The hope rises out of him and threatens to permeate all of Jerizalém.

      I have seen hope in Zoranje, in Lindia's family finally getting a piece of land to have their own garden for a source of food and commerce. Lindia stands before my eyes, bigger, healthier, and she smiles, and it is then that this hope fills my being- that God has remembered her. That he has brought her out of the dark place, and into a place where there is hope. I look at Lindia and I feel God giving me the hope I stopped being able to see for all of the kids still in the situation she used to be in.
 

 God's love beckons hope in the smallest, most simple of moments. Hope comes in things of joy- of driving through the fog of Kenscoff, of rain soaking you to the bone, of finally driving a motorcycle here and simply remembering something that you love.
      Hope is something you can't talk about. It takes away the words that were on your lips just a moment before. Hope quiets you.
      Hope is what reminds me that God is in my midst. Hope is the way God is kind to you in the midst of grief, hope is His way of letting me see the things that I don't know how to look for. Hope is the thing God presses into that gaping wound in your chest . It is what happens after the part where he completely, and utterly silences you by the way He loves you. Hope, I think, is the place where deep sorrow meets great joy, the place where you come to know the Jesus who wept bitterly over Lazarus, and brought the greatest joy the world has ever known.

The Deliberate Kind

                  I was on my way to the store the other day. I got on the same tap-tap to Geral as a woman, and whom I am guessing was her son. She was impossibly skinny. Her skin and bones hugged so tightly together that I couldn't imagine blood being able to pass through. Her son was coughing, maybe from the dust, but more likely because he was pretty sick. He had the same eyes and demeanor as another boy I know. Beautiful and kind.
               Before we had gotten on the tap-tap, I had watched him leading his mother through the chaotic street, gently and protectively. I watched her smile needlessly at him as we took off, as she watched with happiness as he ate the krém she had bought for less than a quarter.
           I wanted to talk to them and ask them questions. Ask if they needed help. If he was sick. If she had eaten today. Where they were going.
           But I didn't want to embarrass them. I didn't want to be the one to take the smiles from their faces.

         
       
       But I realized that more than all the questions I wanted to ask, and things I wanted to do, I just wanted to know them. Know this boy with kind eyes who loves his mother so gingerly, know this woman who probably sacrifices most things for her son, who's love for him lies within the hum of her voice.
           I started dreaming in the depths of myself, dreaming not of doing something, but of becoming someone who knows people. Someone who helps people in such a way that it breaks racial barriers. Passes social codes. That embodies the mystery of love itself, and moves people not only towards living a better life, but to seeing Jesus in the very ones besides us. I started dreaming of Jesus. I started dreaming of friendship. But I also started to feel something, a deep urging inside of me to be asking God something.

                 
            There is something deeply wonderful about loving someone simply because you choose to.
            I think it is rather easy to feel compassion for a child living in an orphanage. I think it is easy to feel love for a child living in such a situation.

           







     I don't think it is easy to continue loving them when you see no end in sight for their suffering.

            When you start choosing to love them, you have to look into their suffering and love them right in the midst of it. Not when it's over. Not when they are healing. But when you know that the suffering will continue even through everything you do to love them.
           

 You take those sick babies into your home for a while, nurse them back to health, watch them heal and breathe and smile. You watch their bloated stomachs grow smaller, their eyes become more alert, their rashes fade. And then you have to take them back to the orphanage, knowing that they will just get sick again.
             You kiss away her tears, try to wish away the hollowness and hurt in her chest after she, the most hard-working, little girl you know, has just been unjustly screamed at, told she is worthless, and that she is going to be sent away. And you leave that day, knowing that as soon as you do, she will be left to take care of a newborn baby and work, still having worthless and ungrateful written all over her heart.
           
       You listen to the sounds of his voice as he whispers to you how badly he wants to leave, how trapped he feels, and how hopeless he sounds. And all you can do is listen, knowing there is no way out for him, not now, not yet.

               It's this eating away at your heart, almost can't bear it inside of you kind of love.
               It's heavy and strong and too much for your body. You get to feel a piece of God run through you, get to feel a glimpse of who and how He is. You get to grasp the edges of this mad, aching, wondrous love that He has for you.
              This love is deliberate. It sacrifices and suffers and chooses what is right. This love, it's kind. It is softly spoken. It is lovely. Warm. This love is choosing what's best for them and not you. This love is selfless. It makes you ache until you are removed entirely, and all there is, is this wanting for goodness in their lives.

               He kindly wrapped that withered hand in His palms. He spoke tenderly to the leper. He ached and cried out for Jerusalem. He suffered and sacrificed everything He had because of the unbearable love in Him. Dying wasn't best for Jesus. But he so longed for goodness for us that He did.

              I guess I never knew that faith is so tied up in love. That you can't have faith unless you love. That your faith can't be more unless you love more.  "And if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing." 1 Cor. 13:2  I have been asking for months and months for more faith, for him to increase my faith, when really, I can't have more faith without more love.

             I feel like there is much that is unknown for the future, of what exactly God will do next, of what exactly it is that He is asking of me.
           


 But I think of Nickenson, of Dada, of Mackenson, and I can't help but realize that Jesus hasn't  asked or pressured me to become a person who accomplishes sizable things or does something big or great. He hasn't created me to be that person. He's created me to love, Him and my neighbor. He tells us exactly how to love Him. By loving others. When Jesus asks Peter over and over if he loves Him, He tells him to feed his sheep. Near the end of Matthew, Jesus talks about how when we love someone in need, who's naked, hungry, sick, in prison...we are really loving Jesus himself.  
     

             I think God has been urging me to ask for more faith because of how unsure I have been feeling about the future. He's been telling me to ask for faith to make me realize that all of my decisions and choices I'm going to make for my future, should be for, and to love other people.
            He's been urging me to ask for faith so that I would love more. And that by loving more, I would have more faith.

 I think that is why I feel that friendship is so important. Friendship makes it impossible to walk away. I can walk away from my student, walk away from a child in an orphanage, walk away from a co-worker. But not when they are my friends. Friendship drags you into the kind of love that Jesus so longs for us to have for other people. It's the kind of love that won't let you walk away. It's the aching kind. The deliberate kind.
          Friendship does not only allow me to know people, it allows me to know God more. And I guess that's it really. To know God. To hear him speak, to watch Him do something incredible, to see Him move every time the world around you changes a little. Knowing God, I think that's all that most of us want. It's what I want.
         

Waiting to be Wanted

 

        "Courtney," Jimmy, our motorcycle driver says to me as we slump against the stairs of my house one night, after a long day. "I need to be reborn, like Nicodemus."
         He sounded different tonight, like he was thinking more clearly about the things he was struggling with, like he felt lighter, more free.
        We talked for a while before he left, and I wondered over my struggles in my own heart. My conversation with Jimmy echoed in my mind, but it was the way he talked that spoke words into my thoughts. I need to be reborn! He had said, but I kept thinking I need life! I need life! The plea resounded in my own heart. I need hope. I need freedom. I need life.

           God waits to be wanted.

                                           - Tozer

          For months I have been struggling with this feeling of  hardness in my heart. It was like my beating organ inside my ribs felt calloused and scarred. It felt shut of. 

          I hated writing, because it leaked into my words. I hated talking about it, because I felt embarrassed and ashamed.

         It's not that I felt apart from God. It's that I felt apart from His love. 

         I remember two years ago, I used to say things like many people do, like "break my heart for what breaks yours". I used to. But then He started doing it.

         I don't think we realize, at least I didn't, that when Jesus breaks your heart, it is supernaturally hurtful. And that there is no preparing for that kind of heartbreak.

        I knew this was why my heart had been hardened, had wrapped its thick guards around itself, and I knew that God was the only one who could undo the damage that closing myself off, had done.

        I had tried so hard to remember what the love of Jesus looked like in my life, but I was soon to learn, that sometimes, you have to watch God love someone else before you can remember anything about His love in your own.

        It started with Moses. Or should I say, Moyiz.

        A 2-day old baby was abandoned at the gate of the orphanage, and the director gave me the privilege of naming him. Ever since living at an orphanage two years ago, Moses was the one I had always identified with. I had clung to his story in hope, and had held on to the restorative way God changed his life. So Moses, Moyiz in Creole, was the first name in my mind, and when someone mentioned the name out loud, I knew it was the one.

       Over the next six weeks after he was abandoned, I watched God love and take care of him, this tiny little baby who wouldn't be able to know Him for years.

       Moyiz had nothing. No clothing, no milk, no diapers, no place to sleep. Nothing. And then God loved him. God loved him and provided funding for diapers. He loved him and brought us to a huge donation of formula. He loved him and found him a beautiful, wooden crib.

       Moyiz stayed at our house for a few weeks, and the entire time I watched as God loved him, through our hands, by His providence, and through Himself. God's love was chasing after this tiny little boy, just like he did in the beginning of Exodus.

         Two weeks ago some of Moses' siblings were brought to the orphanage. His brother Nickenson only spent a few days there before we decided to take him to the hospital, which turned to be too late for the day, so we took him to our home instead. And I was to watch again, as God loved someone in the walls of our home. 

         Nickenson was malnourished. A hard and big stomach stuck out under his tiny ribcage. He vomited his meals, and couldn't go to the bathroom. His hair was turning red, and big legs moved 

feebly beneath him as he walked. But more so, he was far away and his eyes were unfocused.
                                                             
         I don't know if I have ever been more excited or relieved to see a messy diaper in my life. Two weeks have passed and now Nickenson eats and plays and sleeps and goes to the bathroom. Even more, he smiles, he gets into trouble, he laughs and he cries.

        How wondrous it is to have watched Jesus begin to heal him with the markings of a love so gentle and near. 

       There are always those moments in your life. Moments when you don't want to say yes. Yes to loving the person who just stole something from a child in an orphanage, or having to miss your only brother's wedding, or only getting to see your family twice a year. 

       But getting to watch God move from this close?

       It is how I find my way through the tearing and aching of those moments. And other times, you don't have to find your way. Jesus leads you right to it.

         The Lord is near to the brokenhearted

and saves the crushed in spirit.

Many are the afflictions of the righteous

but the Lord delivers him from them all.

He keeps all his bones,

not one of them is broken.

                                              Psalm 34:18-20

            It had been half a year since I had seen my family and friends, and besides my flight getting cancelled and battling the usual sickness, it was beyond wonderful to be back home for a visit. More than anything though, God would answer my prayers and would refresh my spirit and would bring the freedom into my heart where a hardness had lived for a long time.

           On a Thursday evening drive through Pennsylvania, He did that. I still don't even know what had been burdening me so, but all I know is, that Thursday, he freed me of it, He drew near. I begged Him to un-harden my heart, and He delivered my afflicted heart.

            As thankful and ready as I was to get back to Haiti, the realization that I was saying goodbye to my culture and family for another six months weighed heavily in my being. I guess I always had it in my mind that leaving would get easier the more times you do it. 

           It does not.

    "And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life." 

Matthew 19:29

              A missionary I had met in Costa Rica had reminded me of this verse once, telling me to cling to the promise of both hurt and goodness in these words of Jesus. I find myself doing that quite often.

            And so I miss all that I have to leave again and again. It is impossibly painful to have to say goodbye all the time. But there has been much goodness. There has been much received, and much life born. 

           It does not get easier. But I get closer. Closer to His heart.

           And that is every reason to say another heart wrenching goodbye, and step back into the strange calling of being a disciple here. And I find that when I obey, Jesus gives every reason to rejoice and to be inspired.

            Yvenante crawls onto my bed and lowers my music. Before I put my book down, the words are spilling from her mouth.

            "Courtney, I want to be closer to Jesus. I love him, but I want to love and know him even more." She looks at me, like she can't find the right words to explain. "I want my heart to change completely." I listened to her as she went on and on, her voice heavy with feelings of the Spirit, and the hunger to know Jesus deep-set in her eyes. "I want to pray more. I want to serve more."

       










I remember her praying for the first time with her own words. I remember giving her a Bible and us reading together late into each night.                          

               Olivier, another friend of mine who drives moto for us on occasion, wrote to me one night; Courtney, I want to live like you. The next day, I asked him to explain, and he explained that we, in our house, enjoy life together. That we do the smallest of things, and simply enjoy each of them. It's strange, that the smallest of things, like enjoying a walk together, can reveal deep love to someone else.

           I made Yvenante go on a walk with me so I could take pictures of her.

`

Because frankly, she's stunning.

        

          But the sun was setting, and Olivier, Nickenson, and Yvenante's daughter, Stesse walked ahead of us with Megan.
          I took Yvenante's hand and remember saying to her, "Look at all that God has done for us these past two years."

          She didn't have to say anything at all, and instead just smiled together at the rest of our strangely-formed family ahead of us.
           Our steps were slow coming back to the house, and my heart was full of hope from all of the beautiful, good things I could actually see God doing among us.







             I have watched God love Moyiz through his abandonment. I have watched God love Jimmy in his questioning. I have watched Him love Yvenante in her humity and in her desire. I have watched  God love Olivier and Nickenson and Stesse.
             I have watched Him love me.
             In my hardness, in my turmoil, in my warring against His love, He has loved me. He has loved me through my spiritual brokenness and has loved me despite my fighting against Him.
             Yes. How He has loved me so.

           I have never danced so much in my life. I have never wanted to dance this much at all. I've never wanted to move so much, to rejoice so entirely, to praise so completely, to worship so utterly, to live so readily. The dry season has ended, and there is much to rejoice in, much injustice to battle, and much loveliness to behold.
          I think about my talk with Jimmy and those resounding words beating inside of me. I need life. I need life. I need life.
         He has given it. He has instilled hope, he has won a war, and he has rebirthed wondrous love into a soul that is prone to wander.
         He waited to be wanted.
         And how much my soul does want.

Dreams and Things

         

         It had been a long day of teaching English when I received the late-night phone call that one of the children at the orphanage in Lizon needed pain medicine. We jumped on the back of our friend’s moto and started tunneling through the dark streets of Croix-des-Mision and Lizon. All you could see in the night were the silhouettes of people in flashing headlights, and the purple-gray clouds layering over the stars.

Somewhere in the midst of a rainy season sky, and the crowded dark streets on the back of a three-person motorcycle ride, Jesus gently and yet firmly encased my heart with his love. It was like in that moment, He was reminding me of the kind of God He is, the kinds of things in which He cares about, the things that He says matters.
Because God cares about Vladimir, the boy who is hurting in the orphanage. He matters to Him. He is important and so is his pain.
Jesus breaks in and makes me realize, that in this moment, I’m making the difference. I am making someone and something which would be forgotten, a priority. That even bringing tylenol to someone late night on a motorcycle is important and worthwhile. 
Sometimes it’s easy to skip over the passages where God restores a tool to an impoverished worker, or He provides a water source for a mistreated servant. 

Sometimes in light of big dreams and trying to do big things that seem impressive and important, I forget that Jesus finds the smallest of things so important. Maybe I just needed some stars and a motorcycle ride to remind me, or maybe Jesus was starting to remind me of something He had been trying to change in me for a long time now.

                 
                  Since March I have turned 21, and since then I have been busy. The kind of busy where you can’t even seem to find a day in your week just to breathe and process the other six days. 
                Teaching English classes. Making lesson plans. Advertising for the school to try and cover running costs. Trying to love 43 children in two orphanages. Trying to maintain a clean and better
environment for them to live in. Doing urban agriculture. Trying to support a family in the mountains of Zoranje. Trying to make it to the clinic each week to be an extra pair of hands. 
          The list goes on and on, and when there isn’t a routine, there is something else. Something else to be done, someone else to love and care for, some relationship that needs to be built. But this isn’t a post about busyness. This is a post of Jesus chasing after me in it all, and teaching me something he has been trying to instill in me for years.

             When people ask me questions, I think about them long after I answer them. I am a person who has no problem with reflecting, in processing through things, in loving to take the time out of life to do so. But since moving down here, I can’t answer the questions which I have always had the answers for, the questions in which I have never been unable to respond to.

I was having a meeting with the founder of one of the NGO’s that I have been partnering with here. Out of nowhere in the conversation, which is usually how I, myself, ask questions, she asked me what my dreams are. This is usually always a hard question for people, but it never has been for me. I have always known what my dreams are. I have always had those dreams that drive me, that inspire me, that push me towards something. Dreams are what I fight for and go for and live for.
But then she asked me, and I couldn’t believe I didn’t have the answer. 
It was then that I realized that all of my dreams had come true. I thought over all of my usual answers, all of the dreams I usually tell people, and realized God had already did it. He has said and answered and done. But I have never not known my dreams. And it scared me. If I didn't know my dreams, what would I be fighting for? What would I be longing for? What would I be working hardest for?
           I started trying to answer her question on my own. But I started seeking the answer in the wrong voices. I have been trying to figure out the very thing in which Jesus has already told me over and over again for years. I have been listening to the lies that Jesus already had to break through more than once. Lies that if I don't go to school and get a degree, if I don't work with an organization or ministry, if I don't have a role that can be defined, then I am worthless, I am not serving effectively, that I can't do anything worthwhile. That honestly, if I didn't pursue these things, I would be dreaming for nothing.

         


           Three months have passed since she asked me that question. Three months in which Jesus would answer me, in the simply annoying, and yet clearly beautiful way in which He does.

              It started with noticing them. The unnoticed ones. The ones who had such plain suffering written in their eyes. It began on Easter when I went to the hospital to visit my friend's mother. When her eyes lit up so bright at having someone come see her. Then as we were coming out and a boy carried his father in, and then as horrid anguish quaked through his body after the doctors told him he was already gone. It started with the blind man on the street. As a woman started beating on him

because  she ran into his walking stick.  It started with the too tiny baby crying in the clinic, feeling the weight of his skeleton frame in my hands. 
               Love has been hard lately. When you choose to love, you choose to hurt. But sometimes, the hurt becomes too much and you choose to harden your heart, you choose to block the intensity of God-love from your being and all the pain that comes with it. 

               I've been doing it. When little children you love so impossibly still continue to remain in the same seemingly hopeless situation, after you feel the heaviness of saying goodbye to someone, and knowing you will probably never see them again, and never know if they will be okay, when you love someone so intensely, thinking God has asked you to love them forever, and instead they are suddenly taken out of your life.. God-love just hurts, hurts more than every other kind of love.
              
               I have forgotten the dreams God has been breathing into my story because I have been shutting myself off to the sources where all of my dreams have been birthed. I have thrown up thick walls around my heart as a defense against such pain, but with losing the suffering, with losing the ache and turmoil, I have lost the love that produces wild and endless dreams for the world around me.
             
  But Jesus never leaves me to myself. 

He will tend his flock like a shepherd;

    he will gather the lambs in his arms;

he will carry them in his bosom,

    and gently lead those that are with young.

                                                       Isaiah 40:11

              Jesus is good. But even more than that, He is endearing, He is kind. He is ever trying to prove his over-arching love to me. He is funny and affectionate and makes me feel the unspeakable depths of my heart. He has been so gently placing His hands over my messy heart, making me feel at peace,

and full of hope and promise. The promise that He is doing something beautiful out of this weird, abstract life He has led me to live.

           He is faithful to the things He calls us to. And I have seen it. I have watched God being faithful, I have heard Him promise, and I have seen Him act on those promises. 

           There have been so many unfathomably beautiful things that He has made happen since we have been here. One of them is watching Him use the friendships we have built for something that has made my being rejoice in. Suddenly our Haitian friends are helping us scrub the fecies and grime from the orphanage rooms. It is my friend

Yvenante who is braiding all of the little girls hair and bringing them snacks. It is our motorcycle driver who spends money out of his own pocket for the family we are helping in the mountains. 

           
        This guy came to the English school one day looking for my friend. I heard his American accent and we got to talking, and he told me he had to come back to Haiti, that he got into drugs and ruined his life.
I told him you can never ruin your life, that it can always be restored. And I so desperately wanted him to believe it, for him to have hope again, for him to know Jesus, and to feel all of the good that He gives us.

        It was this weird, washing-over kind of feeling that ran into my spirit and somehow, this short encounter with this man made me remember. Made me remember who I am, who Jesus is trying to make me to be. 
    Someone who deeply and desperately cares about that one person who everyone has probably given up on already. Someone who holds the baby no one else notices. Someone who fights for the orphan living in a place of corruption. Someone who comes alongside of the single mother trying to find a way for a future.
I get so caught up in what the world tells me I need to be, and what I need to have. I have felt so smothered by so many voices pushing and saying and implying that without a specific role, a trade, a degree, something you’re really knowledgable in and super passionate about….that really, you aren’t useful.
It makes me feel not important, not helpful. It makes me feel embarrassed, and really, just pretty worthless.
I have wanted and still want these things though. I have wanted to be really good at something, or really passionate about something. I wanted Courtney to be good at agriculture or leading worship or helping medically or fixing things. I have so wanted that, but that’s not who God has been making me to be, what He has been writing and forming me to be.

I hate that I constantly try to form my own heart. I try to shove desires in there. Try to hate what I love, try to love things that I only like. I keep trying to change the person God keeps changing me into. I fight Him.
  But I want Him to win.
I want to be passionate about the things God has been pressing into my heart. I want to be humble. I want Jesus and Jesus alone to define who I am and my role in His kingdom. I want to stop caring about my life so much, and I want to care about that one other person. I want to stop, always. On the street, in the orphanage, in the school, in my home, in the mountains.
I just want to care. I want to love, and I want my soul to rest in knowing that as wildly undefined as those things are, that this is who I am, these are my dreams, and that it is enough.

Holding Fast

     
           Rudolph has scabies from head to toe. Boils and open sores. Scabs and bleeding cuts. Its up his nose. In his ears, clogging his eardrums. The spots of skin that don't have the painful sores are peeling like he's been bathing in dish soap for a month. 
           He slouches next to me and holds onto his ears. He's crying. His tears unnoticed and unheard.
           I take his peeling hands in mine and ask him if his body is hurting. It was a stupid question.
           My mind is at war with my heart, and I'm frozen in place. Don't touch him. Don't touch him. I hear my thoughts collide through my mind. I look at all his hurts- his awful, sick body and feel the warnings run through mine. It's contagious. I let myself think it, let myself know it. It wouldn't be the first, or the second time I have contracted something from them.
           Rudolph is crying, but with the kind of pain that doesn't let sound come out. And then I break, and my heart gives way, and I feel my own tears falling away.
           Common sense. Repulsiveness. Fear. I feel it all and then look into Rudolph's eyes. I see all of the pain and the hurt on my little boy and know I can't and I won't push him away.
           So I pull him to me and hold him close, and I feel Jesus win against my flesh. I feel love overcome what the world cares about. I feel our tears run together and then stop. I feel love meet the need and cover it.
                            December 2014
         

           With close to five months of life to catch up on since I have last written- I had spent a few days writing a lengthy post trying to describe everything that has taken place since November. But then the last few weeks passed and I couldn't help but erase it all and start over.


         Since November, I have finished interning under an adoption lawyer, I started renting a house and had my best friend join me, and in January, I officially moved to Haiti. So many decisions have felt somewhat hasty, and yet as if the Spirit had been moving me to make them for a long, long time.


         Life has been a rush. One of jellyfish stings and killing lunar moths and cockroaches. Of learning what life looks like in Haiti without a car- of jumping onto moving vehicles, fighting for the next TapTap, and weaving in and out of traffic on motorcycles.
     


Life has been adjusting to learning to cook with minimal ingredients, to coping with fevers, burns, and infections, to learning self-defense on our dusty rooftop.
       



       Life has been new, with going deeper into the mountains than I have been before, with being tossed into a teaching position I don't feel qualified for, with not being alone here anymore but having someone to walk alongside of me in all that we do here.

Life has been a rush of beautiful, but beautiful is often found amid the broken.

            Close to two weeks ago, my friends serving in the mountains were attacked and robbed. The other day we went to see them in the hospital, with close to a week of recovery, we rejoiced for their bodies and for their lives, and stayed for hours, so thankful that they were alive and recovering, and yet deeply hurt by their bruises, and stitches, and aching affects of gunshot wounds and trauma.

             As we sat with Sister Mary, she began crying. They were leaving Haiti. Leaving everything they have built and have been doing for years. They were leaving the lives they had made. They were leaving Vincent, an orphan she had raised since he was a baby.  There was deep pain in her crying. Utter loss and hurt. And I cried with her as I felt all of her sorrow and pain and turmoil of her heart invade my own. Anger. Uselessness. Confusion. Fear. It was all there. All there in that room, and all there in my being.                

          We had so much hope for this weird thing God seemed to be doing, and with such an odd mixture of people- nuns and a priest from France, an Irish pastor and his wife living in England, some Haitian friends, and us, two American 20-somethings. We had planned to start working alongside of them, and now not only were we losing our friends here and they were losing their entire lives here, but now entire villages of people would lose access to medical care, education, and work.

Let love be genuine

abhor what is evil

hold fast to what is good.

                              Romans 12:9

                  The world can be dark. Sometimes disease, and hatred, and persecution, and corruption can almost block out any kind of light thats been lit. And then when it's people you love that are suffering, your friends that are persecuted, ones you know deeply that are hurting because of selfishness and greed, the world seems even darker than it did before, and you can't see how God can possibly "work it out for good."

 

                              

                    Except He does. Somehow He does.

               A few years ago I had asked someone what it actually means to trust God- how trust can be something real, and known, and solid. Not some askew thing in the air.

               She told me to trust God, is to trust in His character- of who He is and in who He has proven to be.

               God started proving himself to me ever since the cross. Because of the cross I can understand who He is, and was proving to be even before the cross. He proves who He is through His Spirit and He proves who He is in what He does each and every day.

              I had prayed for my friend. I prayed for a safe place for her to lay her head, to know that she is safe, and has eaten, and is okay. The very next day God answered with the exact funds I needed to rent this house for a year. And now every night I know she is safe, I know where she sleeps, I know that she eats, that she's okay.

             I prayed for her and her daughter's future- that they would have one, and that they would be able to be together again. Faithful people responded and now Yvenante can finish high school and have a start towards their future and a way towards being able to have dreams. 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

              In December, there was a scabies outbreak at the orphanage, days before I was leaving to visit my family in the U.S. I begged God to provide for them, to take care of them, to heal them. And the day before I left, He provided a doctor, a way for them to be treated and checked upon, and even a way for me to be updated on their health while I was away. 

          Over and over, God proving the kind of God He is.

          There have been big things and there have been small things, and God has been faithful in them all. In providing food when there was none, finances when we had none, ways for us not to be alone on the street when it gets late...over and over, God proves who He is. And who He is, is faithful, is trustworthy, and is ever deserving of our hope and trust and wait. 

           So when I remember everything God has done and keeps doing, even the most hopeless and unlikely of situations becomes something that I can trust God to restore. He will provide for our friends leaving the mountain, and He will provide for the people being left in the mountain.

           I hold fast to what God is doing, and what God is doing is good.

           I feel like I am constantly working through the difference between wisdom and trust. The reality is that really, wisdom is to trust, and trusting is wisdom. Some have told me to leave, and sometimes in light of everything happening in Haiti right now, I feel like a fool for not heeding what seems like wisdom. 

          

  But I guess that really is it. I am a fool, so foolishly in love with this God of mine. But love doesn't make me blind.  Love makes me see.  Love makes me hold fast.

             I hold fast. I hold fast to the sick, malnourished babies I hold each weekend at the clinic. I hold fast to the reality that when I don't feel adequate or ready to teach English, I can be used to equip my students with something that can help them find a job. I hold fast to what I feel God preparing me to do in one orphanage in Lizon, and I hold fast to the hope that Jesus will act and come forth for the children in the orphanage I've been involved with. I hold fast to all the beautiful relationships God has formed for me here. For a motorcycle driver that now comes to church with me, for a single mom that now lives with me, for students that challenge me, for children that bless and change me, and for friends who I find deep encouragement and gladness in. 

         I hold fast to all that is good. I hold fast to the One who is good.

Changing My Mind.

       This is Yvenante.



 







 She just turned 24 this month. A few months ago she lost her job, lost a place to live, and now can't provide for her daughter, Stesse, who is now living with other family.

     She is one of my very best friends.

      Close to every week, I go with her to visit her daughter. Every week I watch them together. Every week I watch her bring Stesse what she scrounges to find. I watch her bathe her. I watch her feed her, and hold her, and look at her.

                                                               I watch her love her.

             As I watch them together, I imagine the way she looks at her daughter when she has to say goodbye- say goodbye to the baby she can't take with her. I imagine it, and then I watch it. I watch her say goodbye.                                                                                           

        And then we leave and jump on a tap-tap back to Delmas. I squeeze her tightly, and she walks away, while I ransack my my mind for the answers and call upon my God for his promises, trying to trust in who He is, and in what He does. 

What is it to trust Him?

         Ever since I boarded that plane back to Haiti, I have been asking myself that question. Asking myself how I can continue to trust Him above all other things...as my contacts build, as my knowledge grows, as he instills more relationships into my life. Things that all seduce my trust to other sources. How do I keep my trust in Him and not in man, or myself, or in resources?

      "I'm just trusting God with this" a lot of times sounds so hopeful, like people are just hoping on God, but aren't actually trusting Him. Hope that's not assured at all.

  I feel like trust is this thing that Christian circles tend to throw out there when they are out of options, when it's their last resort.
        I started asking Jesus to teach me. To teach me how to trust Him undoubtedly, to have my trust lie in Him before and above all else, and to teach me how to trust Him, even in my untrust.
        And He has.
                    Gently. Fixedly. Surely.


     
          The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ.
                                                                            1 Corinthians 2:14-16

                          In the three months of living at the orphanage, God changed my heart fiercely- what I cared about, how I began to love, what I started to deeply desire for the world. And now?
              He's changing my mind. Changing how I think, how I see and look at things, how I make decisions, why I make choices. He is taking over my mind. And it is absolutely terrifying.
             Sometimes I feel like he sits beside me, baffled along with me, as we watch as I wrestle to give Him control over my mind. It's like he asks in a whisper, "Why are you so afraid to give up your mind, when you have let me come in and take control over your whole heart?"    
       
         I have heard a lot about Jesus renewing your mind, and have been reminded of that verse we all know that coincides with it in Romans. I have felt Jesus renew my mind over the years, have experienced Him changing how I see things and think through things.
             But never has it been like this.

          I feel as if my arms are high above me, clinging to nothing but the One above me- watching from the back of my mind as He thinks for me in the front, watching, wincing, and saying, "okay", as he chooses for me.
         Turn down the things that would make you trust in them instead of me. He says that to me, and everything about a single day will change. And suddenly Im turning down job offers, and things that make perfect sense, and am making choices that I know will lead to sickness, heartache, and trouble.

       
         Jesus was being Jesus, and was preaching and healing and doing superhuman things, so much that the crowds were almost crushing him in the attempt just to touch his robes. There wasn't even space for him to eat. They kept following him and following him, and when his family heard of it, they went out to seize him, saying, "He is out of his mind!"

       
Jesus has made me into a fool. He continues to strip me of the things I take pride and solace in. There are times when I don't feel smart, or healthy, or beautiful. I think of Jesus, naked, exposed, and shamed on the cross, and begin to start accepting those parts of life that I have agreed to by choosing to follow Him- accepting those moments when people tell me that, "I am out of my mind." When I feel embarrassed over sickness, when I feel shame for choosing what looks like the uneducated and naive decision, when I feel hurt when someone rebukes me for getting myself into messy situations.

           Sometimes I don't realize when the intensity of my driven spirit can start to take over my life. So much so, that I will be so focused on all the things I need to do, to figure out, all the things that I need to learn in order to live here, and do in order to serve my friends here, that I forget to enjoy it.I forget to enjoy the life Jesus has called me to, and all of the beautiful moments He lavishes upon me every single day.

            Like realizing when you hit a new level of understanding in the language, or how it feels to make someone smile here and to feel like you somehow gave them some hope, even if it's just for one  day. What compassion and real, unutterable love feels like to run inside your own body. To be blessed with opportunities to hold and give love to malnourished babies that weren't cared for, or to cross into the Domincan Republic and visit a new country, or to live on an island where mountains steal the air from your lungs and the ocean brings rest for your weariness.
             I forget to laugh along with the life Jesus dreams out for me- one where I can laugh with him, as rats fall out of trees next to me, and red ants invade all of my prized nutella.
              It is overpowering not knowing what to do when your friend misses her baby, or you find out she's on the street, and it is exhausting to leave the kids after weekends or days spent with them, and your heart is ripped from its place over and over again.
             

                I spent the weekend at the orphanage the other week, and there was a moment when Tanya ran to me outside while everything was a total chaos with running children, soccer battles, and bath time. After holding her for a while and watching it all, I set her down and looked at her, taking all of her 3-year old self in.
         












         I memorized every curve and feature of her face, and said to her, "I love you, do you know that?"
             She smiles at me, and says, "Wi (yes)."
            "Jesus loves you, do you know that?"
            "Wi!"
            "Do you love him?"
             "Wi!"
            "Why?" I ask her.
            She looks at me, and grins her huge grin, "Paske li zanmi m'!" (because he's my friend!)

            Moments like those are worth it all, and are when I learn much about Jesus, by learning who He is to another human being. And to my little three-year old in the orphanage, He is someone who loves her and is her friend.

           God comes forth and breaks into moments of this life and restores, and heals, and makes beautiful that which was full of darkness. He is a friend to the orphan.
           He is a friend to Tanya.
           And if that isn't enough reason to trust Him with not only my heart, but also my mind, then I don't know what is.

                *If you are interested in getting involved to help Yvenante, please contact me.*
                                     

Foxes Have Dens

    I tucked them in, squeezed them each tightly, and whispered love into the creases where I kissed their little cheeks before bed. 

       I crawled into the bunkbed with my oldest girl, Lindia, and watched through my mosquito net as they fell asleep. Soon the dim candlelight withered and the room fell to the night, and I was filled. Filled to the upmost with contentment deep in my being.
       
      I was home. With 19 children that hold shackles to my heart. Home in Chrislove and Wood falling fast asleep against my chest, home in the constant buzzing of Creole and no hints of my first language to be heard. Home in being surrounded by little people, and with the distant kompa music as night falls. Home in leaning against Richard, in tickling Micheline, and in being tangled in a mess of tiny limbs and brown eyes every hour of the day.

        Joy nestled itself against the walls of my chest and threatened to unleash my heart from its place.

        But then the night wore on, and on, and the conditions threatened to make me miserable. The rancid smell of urine coated the beds, their clothes, and the entire house. Utter filth covered my entire body and I couldn't distinguish between what was dirt, or sweat, or mosquito bites. Mosquitos screeched next to my head, but most of all, it was HOT. With ten bodies in a little unventilated, equator-weathered room...I laid there with my body soaking with sweat and my skin feeling as if it were being burnt by the sun itself.
          I must have laid there for hours. But for hours full of a longing and parched soul, talking with Jesus in my sweat-drenched sheets. 
          He was with me in the way I so wish I could form into words. I was home in the truest meanings of such a word. I had returned to a place of communion with Jesus that was intimate, sacred, and full of desperate neediness for Him. I had returned home, where I look a whole lot less like me, and much more like the one who is able to form such places inside of me.

        

        "Foxes have dens, birds of the air have nests, but the son of man has nowhere to lay his head." Matthew 8:20

          This scribe came up to Jesus and said, "Teacher, I'll follow you wherever you go." And yet, this is how Jesus responded to him. I say this to Jesus all of the time, and just as he knew, this is what I constantly find myself wrestling through.

         Home is something I find myself thinking of quite often, maybe because I have been transitioning almost nomadically over the past three years, or maybe because I can't really call any place "home." When I lived at the orphanage, I began to understand, to intimately know, what it means for Jesus to make a home inside of you, and for that home to be the truest meaning of such a word. But now that I'm not living at the orphanage anymore, I'm learning how to reach that place again, even when I don't feel desperate and needy and lonely.

         So far, my experience in Haiti this time is drastically different from when I was living at the orphanage. I am seeing new parts of Haiti, am on the go constantly, and am experiencing new things every day. It's strange to be living with people who know my own language and culture. It's even stranger to not be waking up every morning to nineteen kids calling my name. Strange isn't the right word for that, it's hard. 

                                                                                                         It's hard to be so close to them, and yet unable to see them every day, but thankfully, I am able to spend more time with them than I had anticipated coming down, thanks to Jesus making the way. 

       

       I'm learning and seeing so much, that I'm finding it almost hard to process and retain everything. From learning basic everyday life skills, to different legal processes, to experiencing riots in the streets against the capital. So many of my questions are being answered, and yet, so many more questioning are just beginning to form.

                  But I am eager and excited, as I consider what possibilities may lie ahead for the kids, and as Jesus whispers more and more about what He may have planned for me to do here.

   It was overwhelmingly hard for me to leave the states this time. The month leading up to my return to Haiti, I felt the weight of what I was actually preparing myself to do- of what it meant to give up my entire world, of realizing the extent of what kind of sacrifices I would be making in my future. To leave my family, my friends, and my community. To be ushered into a life with so many unknowns- void of a culture I was born into, a language I was filled with, and people that I dearly, dearly love. 

        "I bet you're so excited!"

         Over and over I would hear those words, but little did everyone know, that a deep warfare was upon my soul, where my flesh and deep wanting for Jesus collided. I was excited, but more so, my being was heavy with mourning all that I would be sacrificing. 

        This rich young man runs up to Jesus and kneels before him, as I did, and seeks life, seeks life in fullness that lasts forever, and longs to know how to follow him more deeply.

         "And Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said to him, "You lack one thing, go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me."

         But the man walked away in sorrow and made the choice to keep what he had.

         I was excited, so excited as I looked into Jesus' eyes, and as he opened his hands and beckoned me forward, invited me to renounce what I had, so that He could give me what I really wanted and asked for, which was to know him more deeply.

         But I felt it. I felt all that He was asking, all that He really meant. 

         I guess I had thought people, were the one thing Jesus would never ask me to give up for him. Because Jesus is about people, and community, and a kingdom. 

         But he did. He looked at me and loved me, and asked me to give up the one thing that would actually produce real sorrow and turmoil in my heart.

         I felt the sorrow of that rich man, but the rich man did something I could not, he walked away. Instead, I carried all of my grief, fell hard on the feet of Jesus, and my king somehow put me on that plane.

        This is where I am supposed to be. That is the overwhelming truth in my heart. I am filled with excitement, readiness, and relief. Relief of feeling it all again- of a place so sweet, of knowing that I am exactly where Jesus has asked me to be, and that as much as I stumble and clumsily chase after Him, I'm there, right close to his heels.

         I have never been more scared, baffled, and hopeful in my entire life. 

         He's doing it again, healing my human heart. The past nine months have been full of beatings as He overthrows my heart and tethers more of his ravaging love and inhuman being to my lowly body.

         I am both feeble and strong. Torn by my mourning and ignited by my hope. Scared of just what He is asking of me, and so longing to surrender everything at but a word. I feel both small and unlikely, and yet emboldened and competent. 

       

 This must be what it feels like to be both incredibly human and sinful, and have a Spirit of the living God breathing and living inside of you.  

         "...but the son of man has nowhere to lay his head."
          Following Jesus...it's beyond painful. It is to welcome discomfort and sorrow into your life, and to not have a a place that is home. And yet, it is beautiful and full. He loves us that much to not let us back out or choose otherwise. He is a chasing, pursuing, and forever beckoning God that jealously holds us tight against him. He doesn't leave me to myself or abandon me in my struggles with my flesh. I am not alone. And He proves that to me over and over. He is here. Before me, beside me, within me. He unravels the ground beneath my feet to lead me toward Him, towards home.

         And so I look at the sorrow and sacrifices in my hands, and toss them to the wind. And I start running, running to the Lord of all that I am, and ever hope to be like.

        

Returning to Haiti!

       It's happening. It's actually happening!       After seven months of living back in the states- processing, asking questions, seeking God, and stilling my heart- I'm returning to Haiti!











   
     I'm not sure that I could find the words to describe all that it is that I am feeling as this reality sets in. I'm excited. Anxious. Tears come to my eyes as I realize just how soon I will be seeing the kids again. That I will be hearing the familiar hum of Creole around me, and will be reunited with all of the friends and people I built such deep relationships with while I was there.    
         But instead of going on and on about all of the excitement in my heart (which I know I could definitely do), I'm just going to get right to it.

   
       Many of you have been following my journey for a while and know me, know who I am, and what God has been doing in my heart with the Haitian people, and with the children that I lived with and helped take care of in the orphanage in Santo.
   



   



This time, when I return to Haiti, I will not be living at the orphanage. Although I would still very much like to live consistently with the kids, I know that I need to spend time educating myself, learning, and wrestling through some things so that I can hopefully begin to better bring lasting, real change into their lives, and to understand what my role needs to look like with this orphanage, and in Haiti.  

   So after much prayer, seeking God, and discussion with people that I trust, I am excited to be pursuing an opportunity I have been given to shadow a woman who I met during my time spent in Haiti, who is an advocate and lawyer for an adoption agency. I am so excited to tap into the pool of wisdom and knowledge that she holds. Whether thats learning how to run a non- profit organization in Haiti, to how the adoption process really works, to just how to do normal, every-day life skills in the country, there is just so much I am so excited to learn from her.
   


      I am hoping to shadow her for around two months, beginning on October 8th, and I will need to raise $3500 to cover living expenses (as the cost of living is higher in the area I will be living in, Petionville), to cover transportation costs to travel back and forth to the orphanage, and to various other locations, and to covers costs so that I can help pour in to some projects we will be assisting some partnering ministries and friends with.
     
     
       I am trusting that during the course of these few months, God will further direct and lead me concerning many things, especially with that of my role at the orphanage. Unless led otherwise, after job-shadowing, I will then be shadowing at Operation Love The Children of Haiti, which is a larger orphanage in Leogane, where I will be observing what a healthy-run orphanage looks like, and what kinds of things work, and what do not. I would be aiming at raising $1,000 a month to shadow there for a month or two. This would cover living expenses, and to help with needs of the orphanage.
        I am in the beginning stages of serving overseas- of just starting out, and figuring out how all of this works. It can be overwhelming. I am young, with limited resources, and a small knowledge of how to raise the means to do all of what I am feeling so called to.
      And I am young. But with a big call on my heart, an incredible community who urges me forward, and a faithful God who incessantly proves his faithfulness and gives me every reason to always trust that He will come through.
        I am not only looking to raise those one-time support costs, but to begin raising monthly support so that I will be able to continually live and serve overseas. In whatever way you might be feeling led to support me- whether that's by these specific costs, or monthly support, or even by faithfully praying for me as I return to Haiti- know that it encourages me beyond reason. I deeply appreciate all of the ways God provides, especially those in which He uses His people.
        If you feel led to financially support me, please send any checks or monies to:
                                               

   1410 Oregon Hill Grace Chapel

                                         Morris, PA 16938

              with an attached note designating the support to my name. 

          If you have any questions at all, don't hesitate to contact me!

       
         Thanks for continuing to walk alongside, and journey with me as I return to Haiti in October!
                                                                  Much love,
                                                                         -Courtney
                                                         courtneydibble@gmail.com
                                                         570-463-2847

To Never Tire of Loving

           It's the middle of the day when he comes running towards me.

           He rolls his head around on my lap, giggling and stretching his little arms towards me. And for what felt like the hundredth time that day, I heard the familiar, Pote m' roll out of his mouth.
           "Pick me up, pick me up." Over and over. I'd just finish holding one crying child, and would pick up one of the five little bodies that were waiting at my legs for their turn.

           After doing the dishes, washing the clothes, helping with meals, taking care of children in countless ways that day- I just didn't want to pick him up. I didn't even think that I could. I was tired. I wanted to be alone. I wanted to hear a familiar voice from the place I had left behind.
        "Why?" I said, "Why do you want me to pick you up? If you tell me why, I'll pick you up."
   I look at my little three year old and sigh as I take in his brown eyes bearing into mine.
          He looks at me thoughtfully and says, "Paske m' grangou."

          Because I'm hungry.

         And so I scoop my little boy up and hold him. I hold him with his empty belly in my arms, and love fierce in my heart.

         Ill be in mid-conversation when that happens- where I will totally disengage and my mind drifts back to moments like that one. I don't quite realize just how far away I'll be until someone ends up waving their hands at me, asking the concerned and confused comment of, "Hey, are you okay?"

         It's hard. It can be really frustrating, trying to engage in conversation and having my mind race back across an ocean.








      The time that I spent in Haiti changed me. For good.
      But there are a lot of changes that I don't understand, because I don't feel like they are good or bad, but simply ways that I have changed and need to adjust to.
       I went from being an extreme extrovert to becoming an introvert. Social venues where I used to thrive now feel so taxing and draining. I zone out in conversation. I feel distant, and I can't fully engage in the usual settings that I used to find so easy. I find myself longing to be by myself more than not.
       I don't function the same way. What I find funny, what I find stressful, what makes me really smile...it's all changed.


      I've been processing through these changes, sometimes even pleading with God to unchange them.

      And then I realize, that sometimes, God changes us despite what we want or feel like would fit better. I feel like we always see change as something that is good or bad, but the ways in which He has decided to change me hasn't been either.
       Sometimes I really find myself longing to be an extrovert again. In the life I grew up in Pennsylvania, I was always an extrovert.
       And while I was in Haiti...I wasn't. And I'm just now coming to realize the extent of that.
       In Haiti I was constantly surrounded by people, and yet...I was always alone. Always, was I alone in my nationality, in my race, in my language.
 
       I could no longer get my energy from being with people, because I was always with people. Being constantly surrounded by humanity all day, forced me to get my energy from being alone with God.

   I was always alone with God. Whether I was in a room full of children, or in the littered streets of people, or traveling to different cities or mountains, I was in constant communion with God. I was forever in dialogue with Jesus. I would fall asleep on my Bible and the Spirit would whisper its words throughout the day. Praying unceasingly became a part of my life before I had even known that it was occurring.

       Which was not the same as time spent alone, but time continuously and unceasingly spent with Jesus while I was with people. His presence was literally my daily strength, and I found real sustenance from feeding on His Word and by talking with Him.

       But now that I'm in a different world, it's like I need to learn it all over again.

     A lot of people say to me, "You must miss them...the kids..."

      I don't. I don't miss them.

      I ache for them.

      What is it to miss someone? Because I've missed people before and it was nothing like this.

      I feel like every phase of this journey brings a new aspect of love. This side of love has by far been the hardest. Fierce love. It's relentless. Unyielding. Burdensome. It brings forth a kind of pain that I still don't understand, because I both welcome and loathe the hurt it causes me to feel.
      Ravaging love...it really has ripped apart my being- of who I am, what I'll do, of how I approach situations.

     I think about love a lot. And not the kind of love I guess most girls my age apparently are supposed to be focusing on. I think of love, of the kind of love that has become such a blessing and burden in my life. I think about all that its done for me, of how it has shaped and changed me. How it has humbled me, of how who Jesus is, becomes more beautiful with the more beatings and lashes of love He graces unto me.

    I think about faith and hope, and how love remains the greatest (1 Cor.13:13).
     Of how you can have the ability to move mountains, and speak in angelic tongues, and can fathom all mysteries and knowledge, and without love, it's all worthless (1 Cor.13). Love is what creates value, what creates worth.
     Above all, love each other deeply, for love covers a multitude of sins (1 Peter 4:8). 
   

 It's so cool to have this truth come to life. The more I start loving like my God, my sins keep seeming to fall away. This love has been God's weapon used against me. It has, and continues, to threaten my dreams, to change what I hope for, and to kill the slightest darkness it keeps finding in me.






     






          Really hard things seem to keep happening. Back in the spring the kids were almost evicted from the building. There have been several times where they have almost ran out of food again and again. A few weeks ago I was informed that the women I grew so close to, including Yvenante, would be losing their jobs. A few days ago I found out that another orphanage that I spent time with just lost a big sponsor and now the kids are looking very malnourished.
         These past few months have held days where I could do nothing more than to bury my head and get lost in sorrow.
         Injustice and oppression are singing in the lives of a piece of humanity where my heart clings.
         I think of my kids crying when food runs low, of Yvenante's voice on the telephone saying softly, "I don't know where I'm going to go."
   

   It's unbearable to know that the ones I love so relentlessly are scared and hungry and miss me. It's a kind of pain whose name I don't know. I feel it over and over, and feel as if no one else could possibly understand...and then I feel God's arms fall across my shoulders.
       Don't you remember...I gave up my child for you. He was broken and bloody and cried for me. He was scared and unjustified. My boy was brutally executed. I know your pain.

      I never realized that when I asked to love more deeply, that this would be the way. That He would allow me even to glimpse His love for Jesus as he suffered in this place, by loving little children who suffer, and through walking alongside victims of poverty and injustice.

   
     And so it's June, and now I currently reside in Quakertown, which is near Philadelphia. Through all of the hard adjustments, aching forms of separation, and longing to be in Haiti, I keep taking steps. I remain hopeful as I pursue my options of heading back and possibly doing school online while I'm there. Every day I'm working through what kind of role God is prodding me into with the orphanage, and what steps I need to take in order to help more wisely, and to bring about real goodness and change for these children.
 


   I am so anxious to return, and yet, I can't help but know that this period of my life has its own purposes, and I get to experience the beauty of everything that goes with walking the day-by-day with Jesus.

 

  Do not think that love in order to be genuine has to be extraordinary. What we need is to love without getting tired. Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies.
                                                                                                       -M.T.
      This says it all for me- for me to never tire of loving where my heart has been placed, and to never tire of loving wherever the body that holds my heart, stands.

Well Do I Know My Guide.

I was glad for the night quickly falling so that no one could see the tears sliding down my face as I envisioned myself trying to let go of them on Friday.
                I finally slipped into the night and made my way to my favorite coconut tree at the edge of our property. As soon as I collapsed against its familiar slant the sobs racked my body.
                I stayed there like that for a long time- leaning up against the coconut tree, taking in the stars and sky, listening to the falling mangos, shivering from the sea wind, crying and talking to God.
                “Kisa w’ap fe isit la, Courtney?” My oldest, Richard, pops out of nowhere and makes me jump. “What are you doing here?”

Richard

                I told him I was talking to God, and then we started talking about God. “I always talk to God. I ask Him to help me to write better in school because it’s hard for me,” He says and makes me smile. And then we talked about other things. Like the first orphanage he lived in, and how his parents finally were able to afford to take care of him and came for him. How he only lived with them three months because his father then died. How he has been here ever since. He told me he watched a little girl die in the hospital. He said he watched them put her in a coffin and burn it. He told me he was afraid.

                And then Yvenante calls for him to collect the fallen mangos before the goats get them, and so I’m left with my God and sky once again. And my heart is bowed to the lowest of places, and offered up to the highest of them. I cried out to my God listening in the skies, and to the God listening in the home He has made in my heart. I cried for the people He has given to me, that He has given me an unquenchable love for. Somewhere in the Haitian night, I was having a conversation with God full of marvel, tears, laughter, and worship, and I would have been content to stay like that forever.
                I hear running footsteps. “Are you finished talking with God?” Richard asks me.
                I smile at him through the dark and get up to leave with him. “Pa janm,” I say.
                Never.

                That was a few nights before I left to come back to the states. A few nights before everything changed yet again for me. A few nights before I would say the impossible goodbyes I had dreaded for weeks. And somehow that day still came despite how much I had begged for it not to, and I left.

                With over 20 hours spent in airports, a car accident coming back from the airport, and then dealing with a viral illness and sinus infection, toe infection, four cases of ringworm, strep throat, high fevers, and muscle bruising from the accident the week since I have been back, only to find out that I have mononucleosis, it has been a lot rougher than I had anticipated on adjusting back to life here.

                To say I miss my nineteen kids wouldn't be enough. I ache for them. My arms ache not to be empty, and my tongue longs to have a foreign language roll off so thoughtlessly. I worry about them. I find myself worrying about what seems as less important, like if someone holds them or tucks them in when they get sick, or if they are just getting pushed aside when they cry. I wonder about people getting them to smile when they are sad, when the sadness reaches farther than the taken toy or scraped knee.

                The first night I got back, I crawled into my bed and sobbed my eyes out. My kids were gone, and Haiti was thousands of miles away. There was no carrying sleeping children to bed; instead I carried myself off to bed, with no persistent toddlers tugging on my clothes, and no pairs of brown eyes peering under my mosquito net asking if I was sleeping.
                I could go on and on about missing them and about all that I miss about my life in Haiti, but there aren't enough words.

                I think back on the last month, how it was so rich of God’s goodness and yet such a struggle with discouragement. I remember so many mornings waking up to Monique’s hands already raised high into the air, already praising Jesus before she even gets out of bed. I remember a night sitting under the Haitian sky with Yvenante and listening to her pray, and as she whispered “amen”, a star streaked across the sky. I think about worshipping God with the Haitian people a few weeks ago, on the day the earthquake hit four years earlier, in a church that had been completely flattened and now stands amidst the rubble. God’s marks are all over, impossible not to see. They are like fingerprints all over a window, except the marks make you see more clearly, not less. But I also remember all of the discouragement. I remember going weeks and weeks without ever leaving the orphanage. I remember my plans falling through to take my kids to the beach the night before we would go, after a month of planning. I can remember so many days where I thought that discouragement would simply take over, where every hope I had of bringing change would prove void. But something I hadn’t expected happened. Somehow, all of the discouragement and disappointment just ended up bringing more passion into my heart, more love for the oppressed. A greater thirst to see the afflicted empowered.

                Coming back to the states has just increased that even more. I keep finding that this passion that burns in my soul for hurting people remains in me no matter where I am. I wrote this over nine months ago after spending some time at a homeless shelter near Norristown,
                                                These are the forgotten. The one the world knows exists but refuses to do anything about. And one part of me feels so sad and desperate that I just long to curl up and weep at the feet of Jesus. But the other part of me is angry, is mad. I want to storm the temple and fling the tables on their sides like the One I serve. I want to rip the veil from the eyes of Christians like Jesus did when He died. Jesus didn’t just show me these things only to transform my heart. I don’t just want to listen to their voices with my ears, I want to listen with my life. I want to take action. I want to cross lines and tear things apart. I want apathy and complacency burned. I want to be a controversy like the One who looked into the eyes of the Pharisees and rebuked them.

                There’s a quote that says something like, “If you want to do the work of a prophet, you need not a scepter but a hoe.”  I love that. I just didn’t realize that it would begin resonating with me so soon into my young life.

                “So, what’s next?” Somehow those words manage to come up in every conversation, no matter how long or how little I will be talking with someone. I never know how to answer that question, because really, I’m just waiting on God. There are so many opportunities, so many paths that can be taken, but instead of being overwhelmed by it, I feel like God has already taken off that burden. Just be still. Just be still and wait. Be still and know who I am, He seems to whisper. And for once, I feel like I am so eager to listen. One of my favorite quotes was said by Martin Luther. “I know not the way God leads me, but well do I know my Guide.” I have learned these words, and I am tasting their joy right now in my life.

                So as of now, I don’t know what’s next. I know the desires and passions of my heart, I know the longing I have to be back in Haiti. But I also know that it’s time for me to be still and to listen closely to my God, and so that’s what Im doing.

               

                I think back to a day where Yvenante and I were laying on the concrete outside the kitchen, exhausted from washing clothes and preparing lunch. I remember taking it all in. The waft of flies, the smell of bean sauce and rice cooking, the hot equator-sun on my face, Yvenante lying next to me, her voice raised to the clouds, saying, “Amen, Amen, Amen!”  I remember her voice sounding like a song. And it’s the song I’m still singing. Because Amen to all that God has done, and Amen to all that He is doing! Amen. Amen. Amen. I know Yvenante has sung those words today like every other day, and even from a country away, I feel my voice lifting with hers too, praising the God who does it all.

99 new pairs of underwear hanging on the line.

My girls!

First time going to church since they came to the orphanage.

Killing my first chicken

And then learning to prepare it

Bucket By Bucket

     It took a bug to start it.

 

         A red ant to fly into my eye and burned so bad that I needed to run to the bathroom to wash it out. Then the tears slipping out from the sting turned into sobs that I didn’t understand.
        With my girls all blowing air on my eye because they didn’t want it to hurt, with Manley crying my name over and over until I came inside to hold him because his stomach hurt, with picking up a crying three year old to figure out what was wrong and getting poop all over my arms, with my incredible friend getting here and having two worlds clash, with getting to watch my kids eat a pile of food for Christmas, with

Creole feeling familiar and America sounding foreign…
        It finally happened and I broke for the first time.
        So I just sat there in the darkness by the smelly toilet, shining my flashlight on the cockroach scuttling across the floor in front of me, feeling beaten from the burning in my eye, the ringworm on my leg, the bee sting on my foot, the bug bites on my body.
                And then I hear knocking on the bathroom door and a rush of voices calling for me.

                “Cot-nee ba m’ ti dlo!”
                “Cot-nee pote m’!”

                “Courtney give me some water!”
                “Courtney pick me up!”

                And somehow that’s all it took.  My kids calling me, my kids needing me. Because for them? I’ll go through every bee sting, every case of ringworm, every foul mess to clean up.

                And for Jesus, I’m finding out that I am willing to go through anything. To reach His character. To see more of Him.

                I have come to expect to have those days, the days where I am just tired and am aching for some alone time.
                I have also come to expect the unexpected, as cliché as that must sound. One day I’ll be on one motorcycle with five other people on our way to the hospital and the next I’ll be getting a karate lesson from a black belt master. One day I’ll be talking about ministry with a two-time Olympian and the next I’m waiting on a side of a mountain because  the

radiator in our car overheated. One day I’ll come home to find we have no water and I have to carry a 5 gallon jug a quarter mile back to the orphanage, and the next I have to hold my two year old after she gets attacked by a chicken.  

                I expect Jesus. I wake up in the morning and expect to see Him everywhere, where He is familiar and where He is not.

 And I do. 

Sometimes it feels like He is moving so vastly that I can hardly behold what He is doing. Sometimes I feel so close, so close to God’s heart that I can almost hear it beating if I stay still for long enough.

“Heart of my own heart.”

God is love, and I’ve been overcome by God, and overcome by love.  Love has taken over. It has taken control of my reactions, my choices, my thoughts. It has chains on my wrists and freedom in its chains.

There have been big movements happening in my soul. Sometimes I feel like God is moving in so quickly, that I feel like a sailor, emptying out his sinking boat, bucket by bucket. And that is me. Emptying out my heart with every bucket. My pride. My selfishness. My bitterness. My plans. The things that I hold so fast to. Sin by sin, idol by idol, bucket by bucket.

There are so many times where I feel like I’m saying, “I see you God. I know what you are doing and I will let you do it. I will let you change me.”  He attacks my sin where it hides deepest, exposes my idols where they clothe themselves under “okay” labels. It’s painful. And it’s good. And I need more buckets.

 

With the pounds of iniquity God is throwing out of my heart, I am finding big spaces that He is filling up with Himself, and with dreams and hopes that are full of light. Dreams that plan big change for the lives of these children, hopes that make a way for me to learn all that I long to, and serve where I long for. I am a dreamer, and I am a planner, and with the two I can get so lost in my own thoughts, that I end up staying inside my head and miss out on all that is happening before me right now. But as much as I am dreaming, I find that all my dreaming and planning and hoping comes down to real moments that have come along simply by living life here.

Moments where Yvenante and I are dangling our legs over our broken pool and share a bowl of rice and hot fish sauce under the moon. Moments where my oldest boy and I, go search for ripe coconuts and he tells me how he watched his father die when he was only four years old. Moments where my friend and I are brought together at the airport by strangers because we are the only white people around that could possibly be squealing at the sight of one another. Moments where I have to unplug the toilet with a pencil and can’t seem to stop laughing. Moments where I have full conversations in another language and don’t realize it until it ends. Moments where one of my girls pushes her way towards me saying, “Eskize, eskize, m’ bezwen di manman m’ bonnwit!” (“Excuse me, excuse me, I need to tell my mom goodnight!”)

As big as my dreams may get, these are the moments that I long for my life to always be full of, moments where God is felt deepest, and where His voice is heard clearest.

 

“When he has brought out all his own, he goes before them, and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice. A stranger they will not follow, but they will flee from him, for they do not know the voice of strangers.” (John 10:4-5)

He has come before me. He has nudged me gently, pulled me heartily, invited me softly, chased after me. And to His voice I listen, because it’s the only voice I know.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Teenage Mom

        So much has happened in these past few weeks that I'm not sure where to begin. So I'll start with this. I am broken. I am full. I am torn. Ripped apart. Completely dependent. Fully surrendered.
              In the month and a half that I've been living here I have learned much.

              I have learned that mosquito nets do not in fact keep rats out. I have also learned that rat poison is my friend. I have learned how to shower in the dark and how to wash dishes with a potato sack. I have learned just how painful of an experience getting your hair done can really be and that you should always look before you sit down, lest you sit on a pile of red ants.
      





         I have learned more about love than I ever thought I was capable of learning. It is my purpose, my job, my calling, my everything. Every morning I wake up to 19 children running after me screaming, "Bonjou Cot-neee!", wanting me to play and hold them, and every night, I smother them one by one with kisses and hugs before they go to bed.

            I am a teenage mom. To nineteen children. The way that I love them...I know it's not of me. I am not capable of producing such a love. I am too inadequate to love as a mother loves, and yet God chooses to use me as such.
            Sometimes I get too overwhelmed. I don't think I have any more to give, that I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel, and I have no more love left in me to pour out.
            And then Jesus whispers, "Courtney, these are the forgotten, the ones I call you to love. I will give you the love you need."
            And He does.

 

            I have begun to build relationships outside of my orphanage as well. I go to school with the kids three times a week to help with the preschool and kindergarten classes, and spent last week with some people from the United Kingdom, who help run both my orphanage and another orphanage called the Mango Tree, which I have also gotten connected with.

And with every relationship that I build, and every place I go, I keep encountering God in new ways, and yet my mission here remains the same.

"By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another. (John 13:35)"

          Love. Sometimes I feel as if it's the one only thing I talk and write about. Maybe because it's so big and the world is so starved for it. Or maybe it's because I so long to be the kind of disciple Jesus longs for and this is how He tells me to do it.






       With the boy at school with diarrhea. With the little girl who reeks of urine. With the harsh woman that intimidates me. With the baby with snot all over his face.

   
       Every day God is giving me these moments, offering me the choice to surrender more of myself and to look more like Him. It's as if He asks, "Will you love as I do? Will your love look like mine?"
       And every time I find myself making the choice, taking the challenge to love. Because more than anything, I desire Him and long to be more like Him.
       So I will love that boy at school. Hold that little girl. Speak kindly to that woman. Kiss that baby.

      I have so much to be thankful for. This past Thanksgiving, there was no turkey, and no table piled with food. There was no gathering with my family and playing board games for hours and hours.
      And as much as I longed to celebrate with the people that I love, This Thanksgiving was perhaps the most beautiful one yet.
     Because there was a feast in my heart, and it's table was full, where I could celebrate with not my family I was born to, but with the family I was brought to. Where I was not a daughter, but a mom. Where I got to watch for the first time, all of my kids go to school because we finally got the funding from a faithful woman who wanted the money from her will to go to the education for the kids in Haiti after she died.

      I am encountering things I have never experienced before-every day. And while I could talk about things like the Voodoo culture here, or getting in my first car accident which resulted in a minor riot (everyone is fine ;)), I would rather talk about the bigger things. Like how I have never experienced prayer like this.
     I keep finding that God continues to answer every prayer I pray, in an urgent way.
     I ask for big things, like for all of my kids to go to school, and He answers.

       Everyone prays with me for healing and I haven't been sick for weeks. I ask Him to open my ears so I can understand Creole and the next day I am able to translate at the Mango Tree orphanage. I ask Him for small things and comes through.
       One day in the middle of the night, I am trying to take a shower and right when I am the soapiest, the water just stops. After a while of freaking out and trying to figure out what to do, I prayed out of desperation, and as I pray, the water starts pouring out.
      There was another morning where I waited for over an hour to use the bathroom, and when I am finally able to get in, the toilet is broken and can't flush. It's so full that I can't even use it, and we have no tools to try and fix it. After staring at that toilet for a few minutes, ready to break down myself, I remember to pray. I kid you not, when I said Amen, the toilet flushed by itself.
      And so these are the kind of miracles God gives me- in the form of broken toilets and showers.

      As I write this blog post, I'm sitting on the edge of an empty, broken pool where a soccer battle is breaking out between the boys, while the little girls are getting ready for their baths before bedtime. Our baby goat is scampering around our backyard, clothes are drying on the line, fruit is falling from the mango trees, and somewhere in the midst of it all I hear God whispering and changing me.


    I don't think I have ever laughed so much, been so broken by such need, longed for change this much, ever loved so much, or felt God moving in my soul like this.

 

   It is beautiful, and it is hard. At the end of the day, I am full of dirt, my legs muddy from soccer with the boys, clothes full of snot, chalk, and dust, hands peeling from washing clothes and dishes so much, and sweat covering my entire being. But this has become home, and it's not just some faraway place anymore, with issues that need to be resolved. These are my kids. I know them by name, and by heart. I know who is crying before I see their face, and I know where each of them is the most ticklish. They are mine to hold, mine to love, mine to help take care of. What a responsibility...what a privilege.

    God reveals himself to me every day. My heart is changing in ways that make me want to explode with joy. He is tearing down my high places. Dethroning the kings in my heart. He is showing up everywhere, in every single thing I do, and with every person I meet.
    When I search for Him, He is there. That promise rings true again and again.


     And so everything really is upside down when you follow Jesus. My culture tells me I should be in my second year of college. Instead, I'm a teenage mom and call an orphanage, home.
     Never saw that one coming.

      Kids are calling. Time to go score some goals.

 

 

    




     

 

Because of a Mustard Seed

That’s all it took. Only a mustard seed of faith that made me board a plane 23 days ago. Only a mustard seed and now my life is changed in every possible way.

                I think that’s what is so often misunderstood about faith. It’s dangerous. It can change what your whole life looks like, like wildfire. Three weeks ago I was in rural Pennsylvania, surrounded by friends and family, and now I’m living at an orphanage in the poorest country in the western hemisphere.

                When I walk through the markets exploding with culture or when a pair of big brown eyes looks up at me and asks me to hold them, sometimes it just hits me over and over again that I’m actually in Haiti, and I start laughing from a deep place inside of me where I think joy lives.

                Adjusting to living life here has been hard to say the least. Whether it’s the mosquitos, the ants, the flies, the wafts of sewage, eating rice every day, showering in unclean water with a flashlight, the constant fatigue, I even had the pleasurable experience of a rat crawling into my mosquito net with me while I was sleeping in the middle of the night.

                But living here has been so, so beautiful, and I can feel my heart being stretched and prodded and transformed every single day that I am here.

                It’s hard to  explain what a typical day looks like for me because no day looks like the next. Sometimes I help roll dough, or mash spices for meals. I wash dishes, and wash lots of clothes. All By hand of course. Sometimes I teach the kids some English, sometimes I help with classes at their school.

                But more than anything, I just love. That is my purpose and I know that it’s why I’m here. I’m with the kids all of the time. I hold them, take care of them, play with them, carry them off to their beds when they fall asleep in their chairs. I’m the one who they come to when they cry, the one they come to when they are sick or get hurt. I have never experienced a place so much in need of love, and I have never experienced something more fulfilling than loving these nineteen children.

                God has also richly blessed me with a friendship with a woman that works here at the orphanage, who’s name is Yvenante. She just turned 23, and raises her 2 year old daughter by herself because the dad ran out on her when she had her. She is one of the smartest people I know, and yet she has never went to school. I don’t know what I would do without her. We do mostly everything together. We help each other when we get sick (which are most days), she teaches me how to do everything here, we talk about everything and nothing. She inspires me. She changes me. Every day she leafs through my Bible when I’m finished reading. She tells me that she wants one but it would take a fourth of her monthly wage to buy one so she cant afford it. So on her birthday I got her a Creole Bible, and now we read together late into the night with one flashlight and two languages.

                I didn’t know what to expect coming into this. I had no idea what exactly I was getting myself into. The situation is more desperate here than I could have imagined. Sometimes the need is so great here that it overwhelms me completely. Only half of the kids can go to school because they can only afford to send half. They need all forms of clothing, and the clothes that they do have usually doesn’t fit them or are filled with holes because they have to hang them to dry on barbed wire. Their beds look unbearable and they don’t have enough so they have to double up on such a small space. And food…there is never enough.

                One night the kids went to bed and Yvenante and I sat out in the screened in room together and I asked her how much food we had left, because I know we were running pretty low. She told me we ran out. There was no food left. I asked her what the kids would eat and she didn’t know. I asked her what we would eat tomorrow, and she just looks at me and smiles, lifts up her arms and says, “Jezi!”

                I think I loved her more in that moment than ever before.

                Later that night I asked her if she wanted to pray with me for food and for God to provide but she wasn’t sure and  instead gets her Bible out, so I showed her where Jesus talks about asking and receiving and where two or three gather, He is there. “Men..m’pa konnen kisa di”, She says. “But, I don’t know what to say.” And I realize she has never prayed with her own words before, and so I tell her more about who our God is, and how He is her friend, how He longs for her just to talk to him and ask Him things.

                And so we pray together, her, in her language, and me in mine, and when we finish I see tears in her eyes, and we spend the rest of the night in our Bibles, hungry for more. And it was beautiful.

                And the next day God answered us.

 

                I am sick most days. Sometimes I am so sick that I can’t get out of my bed all day. A few days ago I was at my breaking point. I was laying in bed with a pounding headache from a hundred reasons, an upset stomach, a fever, coughing, sneezing, throat swollen. And then, a little three year old boy named Laurence snuck into my room and climbed onto my bed and I felt his head and I knew he had a burning fever too. And my mind drifted back to when Jesus was being crucified and he refused to take the wine, even though he knew it would dull his pain, because he wanted to be in his right mind. Because he still had work to do. For me, I think it was because of the thief, that he willingly suffered with the pain just for the one he still would bring into the kingdom.

“It is enough for the disciple to be like his teacher and the servant like his master” (Matthew10:25).

And so I climbed out of bed and carried Laurence to the washbin and gave him a bath and some medicine, because I knew I could choose to look like my king right in that moment. I could suffer, I could keep going for all of them, and I could even keep going for just one.

                 “What I tell you in the dark, say in the light, and what you hear whispered proclaim on the housetops (Matthew 10:27).” And this is what I want- to proclaim all that he whispers to me, all that he moves in me, all that he asks me to surrender, all that he asks me to care about, all those he calls me to love.  And I hope this blog is a start, is a testament to the great grace I have been called to respond to.

 

God is one the move-both in this place, and in my heart. And if I hold still, if I just watch and wait, I see the mountains being tossed into the sea all around me. All because of a mustard seed.

"Awake My Soul"

True North Graduation

         It's been seven months since my last blog post. A crazy seven months filled with God's Spirit and adventure and falling deeply in love with the abundant life I am finding when you surrender your heart to follow Jesus.
         The months leading up to my graduation from the True North program were indescribable. I went from spending three weeks in Costa Rica, to discovering methods of technology for the poor with a man from India, from learning in the urban context of Norristown, to worshipping with the disenfranchised of Williamsport.
        God has done nothing but awakened my soul to life, what life is supposed to feel and look like anyways. I'm not sure how many pages I could write trying to explain, summarize, and depict my journey this past year. So rather then bore you, I'll just save that for my journal, because I'm quite sure that I will be unpacking through this experience for years to come.
        Currently, I am spending my summer at Three Springs Ministries, currently as summer staff, serving as the photographer and videographer for this ministry. It looks a lot different around here without the other interns living life alongside of me. Today I jumped into a car with my True North director and another intern that is also serving at TSM this summer, and we ventured into Williamsport to seek out opportunities for our high school camp to serve. We found ourselves in the very place where God began awakening my heart to love people deeply, and to the place where my heart had been invested and tied to throughout my internship.
       "It's not that I'm afraid that rich Christians do not care about the poor, I'm afraid that they do not know the poor." Shane Claiborne wrote this in one of his books, but for all I know, it's what could have been written in my soul this year. Because I only used to care about the poor, but today when I stepped through the doors of Sojourner Truth Ministries, I saw not the disenfranchised or the poor, but I saw my friends. Something about that moment made me realize that Jesus had been working through it all, using these relationships to break the kingdom in to my soul.
        And this gives me hope. Hope for the things to come, but more so for the things of the now. "We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain."- Hebrews 6:19

  

Samaritan's Purse

Two Fridays ago, we took our youth group to Lewisburg where we helped pack and load shoesboxes for the millions of kids who will be blessed this Christmas through Operation Christmas Child. Here's the video.

Hurricane Sandy Cleanup

 

 

       A few weeks ago, I got the opportunity to serve in Toms River, New Jersey to help with some flood cleanup from Hurricane Sandy. No planning. Just a few days notice of my pastor and also good friend saying, "Hey I really want to go do this", and me saying, "Count us in. We want to go." So a few days later ten of us (all of the interns and two others) climbed into a van and headed to New Jersey. Here's a video I filmed and edited from our trip!

 



True North

                                     
       And now we come to my "now". Instead of going to college, like everyone had expected me to, and how I had always expected me to, God had other plans for me. I am currently doing a nine-month internship at Three Springs Ministries called True North. This had not been my plan. I had dreams of going to school far away, let alone staying in Pennsylvania and not going to school. But God called me to do this, and when doors kept closing for me everywhere else, I finally chose to obey. True North is an internship dedicated to cross-cultural missions, biblical living and learning, and service. So I moved in on September 1st and two days after, we loaded up a Sprinter and drove across the country to the capital of the Navajo Indian Reservation on the border of New Mexico and Arizona.



We spent a week there, diving into the culture, exploring the rock formations, and getting to know each other as we started this journey with a 36 hour van ride as an introduction. We met so many great people, namely some former interns who are native Navajos and an impossibly sweet man named Julius. We got an incredible oppurtunity to go to the Navajo Nation parade, which is HUGE and natives come from reservations from all over to celebrate thier heritage together. We got to play ultimate frisbee with some native kids, and we got to spend some valuable time with some great people who are missionaries on the reservation.
But it was the little things that made that week valuable, and often times those things were very simple. Like climbing up a cliff in the dark to watch the sunrise, or repairing a roof together, or exploring the wilderness and pulling cactuses out of each other's clothes. This journey was becoming real to me, and our time in Arizona felt like a drumroll to the song we would be listening to for the next several months.

    After spending a week on the reservation, we got back in the van and traveled to Colorado to backpack in the Rockies. This experience was another part in our beginning as discovering our lives together as a community.

 

 

 

 

 

Colorado pushed us physically, mentally, and we got to experience God's creation in a big and beautiful place. Cold nights, dry freeze food, and warm wool socks were a given. I could sit upon those mountains all day and gaze at that Colorado starry sky at night, and I would be ceased in my amazement of God's hands and the beauty of their work.

 

 Rio Grande Pyramid (Left) was 13,800 ft, and we woke up around five thirty the last morning to climb it. Colorado was intense, but we managed to survive in one piece surprisingly, since none of us had done any previous training.
So we traveled back to Pennsylvania and thus began our time with Three Springs Ministries!