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.