ponderings of my busy heart...

The Lord seems to be working me through a particularly thoughtful time. There is so much around me all the time...almost too much to process, and so much to be thinking through. My thinkings always leave me short: short of understanding, short of answers, short of what to do, short of follow through. I'm asking for His thinkings, that He might guide my peace, my understandings, my take-away.

Just this past week...my heart is busy pondering it all. Belony, Charitable and I visited a man Wednesday that was one of the the two first converts on Tuesday. They had told me his was sick, but...he is SICK. We trudged through mud and open sewage to arrive at his "house." A shriveled ancient-looking woman with kind eyes introduced herself as Marie-Claire, his sister, over a steaming pot of mush. She led us inside a hut built from woven palms once covered in hard mud, now crumbled and patchy.

A Haitian hernia operation gone bad had left Pehpay bedridden. The hut wreaked of urine as we huddled around him, and I fought back tears as my eyes adjusted to the darkness. He had once been clearly a tall, very able man, with huge feet, huge hands, a broad jaw and broad shoulders. Today, his stomach was hugely bloated, his biceps and forearms so shrunken that his elbows were by far the largest part of his arms. He wheezed as he shared his story, and tears followed deep paths in his face as he reconfirmed his new salvation.

"Do you believe completely that He is your Lord?" Yes. "Do you believe completely that He can heal you?" Yes. "Do you want to be healed?" Yes. And then we prayed for him for a long time, and as I held his hand and prayed, my mind and heart were just swimming with Bible stories of healing, testimonies of healing, all my life's questions of healing and what it looks like and how it works and when it comes and how...

I kissed his weathered cheek and we headed back to the campus, now silent. We could hear his haggard coughing persist as we walked on.

The same night I kiss Lily's freshly washed chubby cheek, inhaling the beautiful scent of rarely-clean baby, heart wrung as she says "Bye-Bye, Mommy" and flips onto her belly for a good nights sleep. She is beautiful and precious and good and sweet and sassy, personality becoming more and more like my sisters, and the love He has given me for her is indescribable. I feel like the most blessed creature He ever made, kissing her, knowing the ridiculous love I have for her is just a shadow of the ridiculous love HE has for her, for ME. So much to think about...

A few days later Matt leaves, and I remember all over again why and how I love him and what a beautiful gift God's given me in Matt. I never take him for granted when he is a thousand miles away, and frequently do when he is in the room. One of the seminary cooks wept through breakfast this morning for the hundredth morning because of her unsaved husband, who has other women, other priorities, spends her hard earned money on alcohol while their children have no money for school, ridicules her faith...and my hearts breaks for her and I marvel that the Lord has given me a husband so after His own heart, so anxious to bless His name and to be a blessing to mine.

Monday a dear friend and pastor comes to teach a course at Emmaus. He and his wife's sheer presence is an encouragement, and their passion to pour into the men and and women here is a beautiful gift. But the last time we were with him, it was days after his dear wife of some 30 years passed away, and talking after Lily sleeps about the difficulty of the past 12 months strangely renews the loss of my own mother...who never met Matt, or Haiti, or Lily, and yet whose irreplaceable friendship and unconditional love and unchanging character I intimately miss.

And just now, our brother Belony left our office, anxious to share with me a third conversion that took place yesterday, the daughter of a witchdoctor, living still in his house. Six young women were with her, all six with at least one baby, all six much too young to be married, to be mothers. He spoke to them all about the Lord, and the witchdoctor's daughter almost immediately accepted, "as if she had just been waiting and waiting each day for someone to bring her the truth."

"But the others," he told me, "Had tried to get their babies dedicated in the church past the bridge, but the pastor would not even allow them to come in, because of their great sins. So, they didn't want to hear anything about that pastor's God, and so I just spoke with the one, and prayed that they would hear, and that the Lord would touch their hearts."

"Stacey," Belo continued, "Didn't Jesus come for the sick? How will this area, that is dark in EVERY sense of the word, and living SO far from the truth...how will this area come to Christ if His follower's push the sinner away and only make place for the righteous? Didn't Christ come for the sick?"

And my heart breaks for the girls I didn't know existed until now, and their dozen children, for the church that doesn't want them, the god they worship that doesn't love them, the God that loves them that they don't want, the man that brought them Jesus but was rejected, for the hours I spend worrying about and doing things that have no significance in the kingdom, for the complacent place I often find myself, content with the little of Him that I have, content to keep my light under a basket...

No answers today, just thoughts!

But unlike "a lonely bird on a housetop," from Psalm 102, I still find myself today, though "wretched man that I am", "the bird that has found a house, the swallow that has found a nest for herself" in Psalm 84 as one who dwells... not in Haiti, not in the past or in the present or future, in the questions or in the answers, in my spouse or child or job, in one culture or another...but as one who dwells in His house, and as such, praising Him.

For a day in your courts...better than a thousand elsewhere.