burn

 I never sleep well the night before we travel.

Our lights were burning late with friends and all the deep discussions that you leave for the end. There are so many heavy burdens I'm so grateful to share, but by the time the last one fell, I couldn't sleep...even if the packing and sorting and planning had been finished.

Ben's right there with me, and by 5:30 this morning he was tossing and turning us both awake...the birds are all chirping in the day, and though it is too early to start such a full one, here I am.

My charging cable took a final twist yesterday and is done, so my last 33% of battery will have to do...as will my last little offering of energy today...as we go from Emmaus, through town, to the airport, to the Dominican, to Fort Pierce (arriving 6 pm) through customs and then start the long 12 hour drive home.

We spent yesterday morning at Bethesda Clinic, getting re-covid tested.  There was one chair, there was sweet time with Ms. Prudence, sharing, as always, all the miracles of her day to day...sharing her desires and the way the Lord shapes them. There was a sacred time of prayer with Dr. Rodney, signing off our paperwork. Dr. Rodney who helped us when Lily was so incredibly ill when she was five. Who helped us when 3 year-old Sofie drank a little bottle of fuel. Who circumcised Ben. Who brought a team to help our little Mayah when she was so very sick last Christmas.

Many are the burdens he shared with me, and truly, I don't know how he carries on. His heavy heart always seems to be in just the right place, and what a gift to spend a few minutes in that office where so many pass, in good prayer.  What a privilege to offer the little I have to pray for men and women such as these. What a gift to pour the little oil of prayer over their lives.

We got back right in time for the last chapel service with an awesome message from a forth year student I remember being a first year student two minutes ago. At the end, everyone gathered to pray for me, and how sweet to receive back so many of the same prayers I have prayed this past two weeks. 

What messes, what shards, what gaping holes, what desperate needs, what crushing weights, what crippling uncertainties have been lifted to the Mighty One these overflowing days. 

There are a few things I start home today to do about them. A few ways I can help, a few ways I've been able to. But mostly, until late around our couch last night, there is just taking these men and women who are giving their all and putting them back on the Father.

There is a need for houses, for sick children, for finances. There is a need for grace in marriages, in relationships, in churches. There is a need for boldness in communities, in holiness, in prayer. There is a need for intercession, for faith, for consecration.

None of these needs are new to Him.

Nor is meeting any of them impossible for His Right hand.

So I sit in the cool of the morning, the mountain silhouette before me and the sky waking up orange and peppered with loud birds. There are several students already wandering the soccer field, mutters of morning prayers lifted up, and I wonder how to hold onto the desperation for Jesus that Haiti always renews in me.

I wonder how to trust Him, away, the same sweet and heavy way I find myself here, required to.

I wonder how to depend on the Lord in a culture of such independence, the way I simply cling to Him in the middle of so much beyond us.

Edlin shakes the bell, six am, and I can already feel that the sun is going to burn today.

I pray that the faithful of Haiti burn brighter still.

In this corner of the world that grows darker by the day--daily stories of violence, kidnappings, instability, manifestations, robberies...murders of the very few police and peacekeepers Haiti had left--I pray that the faithful of Haiti burn brighter still.

Burning, it often costs you everything, doesn't it.

I will fan this flame in Haiti in every way I can for as long as I can with all that I can...for Jesus radiant in others is simply too precious to sit by idle.

And I will burn myself out in the country we're now back to also calling home, where affluence and ability to provide for oneself, where comfort and our own wisdom often seems to smother what once burned. I will keep searching out fires to fan, I will keep trusting the grace of our prayers, drip, drip, dripping into the hard and impossible hearts of others, trusting that they will kindle.

If our God were silent... If our God was limited.

If our God were not at work...

But.

He is.

And if I've only got one candle to burn
...then He will be at work through me.