everything is already good

There is a lotta lotta broke, isn't there. 

It's all so broken, I don't even know where to begin.

Tout bagay deja byen.

It seemed like a strange worship song the first few times we heard it in Haiti. Even our choppy, new Creole could translate that...Every Thing Already Good.

Singing those words in Haiti made about as much sense to me as all the women we'd passed on the way to church sweeping their dirt yards with straw brooms.

But over the years this vibrant Haitian chorus--always accompanied by syncopated clapping till your palms hurt--became our very favorite.

It doesn't end, of course, with Everything is Already Good, but simply and repetitively states with all the power of child-like faith Jesus elevated again and again, 

everything is already good

everything is already good

because Jesus sits on the throne 

everything is already good 

everything is already good 

everything is already good  

Satan loses the battle

Satan loses the battle

because Jesus sits on the throne

Satan loses the battle

Satan loses the battle

Satan loses the battle

This kind of broken, our world today? There will be hardly a moment of peace in it. 

EVERY life brutally, horrifically, sickeningly taken--from Abel to Ahmaud to victims of war and crime and starvation and trafficking and cold-blooded-twisted murder to the 125,000 babies killed world-wide every single day--maybe there might, rarely, be some fraction of human consequence administered that we perhaps could feebly call "just". 

Holding out for that justice won't give me one minute of sleep, were my hope wrapped up in human handlings. Just typing his name, just googling that statistic and my eyes are overflowing.

But justice, friends, it IS here, in this drop-in-the-bucket life and for all eternity. 

Everything is already good in the justice department, for it has. been. promised., it will be given...and not brokenly by broken fellow-men, but by the One Innocent, the One Who Sees and Knows, the One in Whom Righteousness Dwells.

Psalm 37

As we pray for our little 2 year old neighbor, either suffering cancer or suffering chemo, back and forth, as we pray for mama as if I were her, as we pray for little him as if Ben were hospital-bound...I can't hardly hold back my sobs through family prayer time. 

If human best was it for him, if human hope was all for them, I am d-o-n-e.  It's not enough tonight, it's not enough for them.

Tout bagay deja bien in the healing sector.  

There will be NO more sickness and NO more pain and all these tears, friends, all these tears...what an image...our God will utterly wipe them out. Gently and completely and d-o-n-e. 

Revelations 21

As we think of all the loss.

All the hunger.

All the lies.

All the injustice.

All the wicked.

All the broken.

All the sickness.

All the horrors.

All the wrong.

All the pain.

All the darkness,

I am trying tonight to find a way to unclench my hands and clap them, clap them with the syncopated symphony of those who are living in His kingdom of now-and-not-yet.

Everything is already good there, now and not-yet, Tout bagay deja bien....

not for any reason except that because Jesus sits on the throne.  His mercy IS in control and His grace is at the helm, and He says that even the thickest, most palpable darkness is not dark to Him. 

He says darkness is not dark to Him. 

Psalm 139

The women in Haiti sweep their dust yards every single morning--handmade straw brooms, I can hear them scratch their unique arches and swirls every sunrise--because raking takes the mess of the sticks and the mango buds and the chickens and the cooking chaff of yesterday and makes it neat again, straight little clean rows of dust to start the day. 

Yes, the yard is still dirt. 

But they do the best they can to make something beautiful of that broken.

I used to live in a broken place, and now I do, again. I'm broken myself, just meet me. I blubber through family prayers and I both trust Him with every fiber of my being AND lay awake at night.

But I will sweep this dirt as long as I live, until He makes the streets golden.

I will bring all the beauty I can of this broken.  I refuse to meet all this broken with more...with bitterness, with hatred, with despair. I will sweep it with His love again and again, and He will not. be. brought. down.

Satan loses this battle.  He can start by losing with mine, the only ones I can control.

bleed me dry, all this broken mess, beat me down.

everything is already good
the One Who Saves
on the throne