family and photos

Helping Grammy and PopPop move the other day, Lily was talking with Howard, a huge young man carrying a sofa.

"We have to leave," Lily told him seriously, "because Grammy and PopPop are moving to Florida.  I'm gonna miss them."

"Yeah?" he asked, "and where are you going?"

"Well, there is a very good thing for me, sir," said Lily very matter-of-factly "and that is that I have LOTS of family.  So we're going to Uncle Don's, and that'll be good, too."

Overhearing her say that, I was so incredibly thankful.  Thankful my girls are learning what family is.  Thankful so many are teaching them.  

Thankful for Grammy and PopPop's house, that has been our home on the East Coast all these years and wishing them the very very best on their new life adventure in Florida!  (Can't believe I don't have any fun photos of us with them these past few days...guess we've mostly just been packing!)

Thankful Don and Brenda have so graciously taken us all in and are spoiling us like family.  

Matt and I have recently started writing for a few papers in PA, picking up a weekly column my Grandpa has been writing for 45 years and is finally retiring from.  I haven't shared our first several weeks, but wanted to share this weeks, "Backing into the Future."

Saturday Sermon

Backing into the Future July 5th, 2014

by Matthew & Stacey Ayars

Each year, we come out of Haiti during summer break for a few weeks to see family and friends and to raise support for the upcoming year. This is always a busy time, but also a cherished time of reflection on the previous year and vision casting for the future.  

As we were preparing our speaking presentation this past week, we started pouring through thousands of photos of the last twelve months of our lives. 

At least forty percent of the pictures, of course, are of our children, Lily and Sofie.  I have hundreds of photos of them playing with friends, dressing up the cat, learning how to swim, growing up before our eyes at an incredible rate.  

About fifty percent of the images painted out the school year at Emmaus Biblical Seminary of Haiti, where we teach and live.  We poured over headshots of every student, vibrant still-frames of crowded church services, pictures of student mission trips including hikes over endless resplendent mountains, animated soccer matches, intense hours in the classroom, training seminars, convocation, alumni celebrations, happy photos from graduation.  

Finally, we scanned through a few hundred photos of visits from family and friends, fabulous tropical flowers, the biggest pineapple we ever saw and at least twenty shots of every single new baby brought into our world in the last year.  Despite the fatigue we were feeling from a huge year packed with all these memories, we couldn't help but feel so grateful.  

In the Old Testament, when Israel encountered challenge after challenge in the wilderness, eyes glued on their hunger, hardships and their unmet expectations, God was constantly telling them to remember. To look back.  

Israel was constantly tempted to look back to their slavery in Egypt, even wondering at times, “would it not have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die here in the wilderness?” (Exodus 14:12).  

It was right in the midst of their temptation that God launched a new calendar of traditions and feasts and set up altars and observations for Israel, forcing them to remember His faithfulness.   

He was constantly taking them back to the Red Sea Moments, as we call them in our family.  Those times in their lives when it seemed that all was lost, that there was no hope for the future, and those times when God miraculously and faithfully fought for them.  Made a way.  Dried a path. 

God taught his people to back into the future, to encounter every new challenge and every new temptation with an aggressive remembrance of God's faithfulness that is rooted in history. The greatest challenges, struggles, and obstacles of our lives are God's opportunity to demonstrate his power and love. The greater the problem, the greater the opportunity for God to show us what he is really capable of. 

As we prepare to share with thousands of people these next few weeks about what God has done in our lives this past year, it was a powerful exercise to pour through all those photos.  They might tell a thousand different stories and show dozens of different angles, but one hundred percent of them point to God’s faithfulness.  

They show His hand: the baby and mother who never should have survived, the help we so badly needed coming through.  They show His response to prayer: the sick child now playing soccer, the house badly needed behind beaming faces, the event so overwhelming now a meaningful memory.  They show His people: the co-workers we never dreamed we find, the students we couldn’t have picked better ourselves, the humble-spirited men and women who continue to show us Jesus even as we work to show Him to them. 

At the end of another year in Haiti, it is easy to feel the weight of all of the defeats, disappointments and heartbreaks.  But instead, we find Him calling us to look back, not at the hardships, but at where He was in the midst of them.

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Matt and Stacey Ayars live and work at Emmaus Biblical Seminary of Haiti (ebshaiti.org).    They can be reached through this newspaper or at staceyhaiti@gmail.com