One of the ways I have hung through this politically unstable, tumultuous season is by literally doing what I JUST did...calling it a "season." Seasons are short, they come and go. This season, it too shall pass.
But the reality is that before BEN was born, Haiti was in already in crisis, we weren't sure our midwife was going to be able to get in. Or Sharon. Or that we could safely get to a hospital. Things were bad.
Baby Ben is seventeen months old.
Hey Stace? That's not a season.
This season of unrest has not been a season.
But unrest? That's exactly what it's been.
UN. Rest.
Last weekend, it rained for 24 hours. Not crazy amounts of rain, but steady and solid all night and all day.
You take the months without fuel. You take the police stepping down, unpaid and outnumbered. You take the prices rising, rising. You take all the political instability. You take the terrible roads, you take so many people hungry, you take schools being closed all semester...and 24 hours of rain channels sewage, mud, garbage and sludge into the homes of our sinking island.
There is no rest, there is no rest for anyone.
You cannot rest like this.
Courageous and perseverant and incredibly strong people prove over and over again that you can live like this. Somehow.
But you cannot rest.
And we all feel it.
What a conflicted middle we live in.
You cannot begin to imagine the state of many people's lives in Haiti today. It has sunk a hundred worlds away from the one I grew up in...the one that had, always, at the very least: a dry place to sleep and food on the table and school and work for tomorrow and a safe place to rest.
Our life here, compared to that one, has grown so limited, so challenging...just to find and provide what we need to live: clean water, electricity, refrigeration, food, relative security.
And yet what we "need" to live continually sets us aside in the suffering, for what we "need" to live, so few have all around us. We are still the only light in all of our village. Still the only fridge. Still the only people with a tap, much less one with clean water. Still the only cars. I type on the laptop, and Bolcy and Chauvelt walk the dewy grass perimeter as I write, watching over Emmaus.
We are so far from a first world life, and so far from a third world one, or fourth, or fifth, too, and as we suffer with the suffering around us, there is no rest.
Unrest.
I ask the Lord to help us.
And today I saw the face of Jesus on our family through three unexpected men, and I tear up tonight recognizing His grace for today was again, enough.
When Matt was stuck, TiLou found him and brought him home. When there were no words, Maxi unexpectedly understood anyway, and cared. When there was a problem we couldn't resolve, Job more than did so, and was with us.
When I focus on the disparities of the world, of ours, of any, I find myself in an impossible place.
But when those around us come around us, well, we are in this together.
Pray for rest, pray for rest for Haiti tonight. Pray for rest for our dear ones, pray for rest for our villages, pray for rest for the weary, rest for the hurting, pray rest for the Ayars.
Surely in Him there is rest for the weary,
and joy for the sorrowing.
Jeremiah 31:25
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