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.