in the shadow

Each year around this exciting time, it seems that some kind of shadow is cast over the sunshine.

Let's face it, as joyful a time as the end of the school year is, it is STRESSFUL.

Matt and I aren't the only ones heading up to the office early and staying up late, trying to get it all done.  Students are working like crazy on final research papers, studying for final exams.  Fourth year students are all polishing off their humungous 3-credit hour Memoirs.  Don and his crew are painting, welding, trimming and repairing from sun-up to sun-down.  Final exams all need created and taken and graded, invitations are still being printed and programs for all the upcoming services formed, Lucner is trying to get diplomas and report cards ready, Vilmer is pouring over a major Alumni event May 16th...

Stressful.

And we're all tired.  It's been a fantastic semester, and fantastic semesters mean a lot of work, a lot of time, a lot of prayer, and a lot of pouring.  From everyone.

It's in these moments--high stake, low energy, high stress--that whatever was IN your cup, comes OUT of your cup.  It's in those moments we have the chance to shine or shadow.  Remain painfully faithful, or stray...laze. 

It's these moments, I think, when it all really matters.  Maybe what's in our cups doesn't matter so much when our cups aren't being shaken.  It's when it all comes splashing out that what it IN there is what COUNTS.

And so each year around graduation, we have had some shadows splashing on our shine.  One year, we had to let a staff member go on the last day.  Another, a student had to be expelled the week before graduation. It seems this year will be no different.

He is a good man.  He loves the Lord.  He shares Him frequently.  But he is under a lot of stress to get stuff done, and so he made a bad decision, and plagiarized his entire final project, independent study, from Wikipedia.  

It's a big deal.  It's a moral deal.  It's character.  And now, instead of working through final details for the program or polishing up their final exams, the administration is spending hours on end working through a little-big thing known as sin: how to address it, 10 days before graduation, what to do and how.  

The Holy way, the gracious way, the loving way, the Godly way.  

And it's not easy, and it's thrown quite the damper on EVERYONE...the heart-broken student, the heart-broken staff, and the heart-broken fourth year class mourning the choice of their brother.  

But if our God is different, so must we be.  If our God is Holy, that's our first priority.  And if Haiti is broken, we must be whole.  If corruption and lying and cheating and stealing is entirely acceptable and even celebrated, we must live far from it.  

On top of this tragedy, the death of a young friend has cast a pall over these days.

Rosalvo studied at Emmaus for three years, and finally after last year had to drop out due to 3 years of terrible grades.  His heart and mind just weren't in it, so after much struggle, he finally felt God had something different for him, and left this years graduating class.  However, he just lives down the road and works in a church right next to the mission, and almost every time we head there for weekly prayer meeting, we see him hanging out with friends or working in his little shop, waving and grinning.

Rosalvo Thermidor (cousin of Wadner, for those who know him/them), front left, red shirt.

Wednesday, a combination of Labor Day and Arbor Day, he and a bunch of his friends and girlfriends headed to the beach.  Apparently no one could swim, and when he and his girlfriend got swept out by the current, several men were able to finally get to girlfriend, but couldn't get to Rosalvo.  He died somewhere between the beach and the hospital across from the mission.

The shock and tragedy of the accident, and his close fraternity with the fourth year class is just hitting us all hard.  

When Lily overheard us talking about Rosalvo, she started asking questions, and finally with my shook up mother heart, I said, "Hunnie, he's with Jesus now in heaven, so we don't have to feel sad in our hearts.  But this is why we're always telling you how important it is!  What is so important when we go to the beach or the pool?!?"

I was getting at learning how to swim!

Lily was entirely solemn.  "That's why it's so important to PRAY, Mommy."

And I had nothing to say.  

If tiredness and stress and sadness are when we are tempted to despair, tempted to cut corners, tempted to laze away from Him, then THIS is when it's so important to be talking to our Father.  To be searching out His voice.  

NOW is why it's so important to pray!  It is the time--even when there seems to BE none--to be searching Him to fill up our cups with Himself, so that even as they are shaken, He is spilled everywhere.

Even in  Especially in the shadows.