Holding Fast (Copy)

Rudolph has scabies from head to toe. Boils and open sores. Scabs and bleeding cuts. It’s 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 are 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 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, stitches, and the aching effects of gunshot wounds and trauma.

As we sat with Sister Mary, she began crying. They were leaving Haiti. Leaving everything they had built and had 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 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, hatred, persecution, and corruption can almost block out any kind of light that's 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 He 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, 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 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.