Hurricanes

As anyone who knows much about my worship life will tell you, I tend to listen to God's message to me best through Christian music. Somehow, certain songs will speak to me and I am hit with an understanding of something I may be struggling with or wondering about. This whole music speaking to me is a bit ironic however, as I cannot carry a tune myself, nor play an instrument. I have been blessed with an extremely musical husband however.  I am guessing that is God filling the musical void left in my own talents.

Nonetheless, yesterday, I found myself herring the song,"He Loves Me", by David Crowder. The song says,"He is jealous for me, loves like a hurricane, I am a tree, bending beneath the weight of his winds and mercy." this always makes me think of Haiti. They have hurricanes all the time.  The trees bend, fall, things are destroyed, the water from the rains seems endless.  I began to consider how it was God's love could be compared to such a destructive storm. The Haitian people do not seem to consider the destruction though.  They pull together and push on, rebuilding time after time til it becomes the norm. We have seen Haitian people carry hundreds of pounds on their head, living with disabilities such as elephantiasis, watching children die, and living without food.  On our last visit, there was a brief storm. It coursed free flowing water multiple inches deep in the streets of Port Au Prince. Traffic did not stop, nobody seemed to notice. We just drove through the fresh river that was the street five minutes prior as did the rest of the traffic.  Yet when these people gather on Sunday for worship, they are dressed as if they are going to a wedding. Their clothes are fancy, dresses for the women, suits for the men.  Many of them walked from the tent city where they only had water.  The service we attended was not air conditioned. It was stiflingly hot and the church was packed to the rafters. The Haitians sang with their entire soul, hands were raised and some people were openly weeping. The next part of that song compares God's love to an ocean, and if so, we are all sinking. These people made that ocean and made it a wonderful place to be with worship.

I have been asked tactfully, and at times not so tactfully, why two children in this season of my life?  As one not so tactful relative said when referring to my children (now ages 18,16 and 7),"you see the light at the end of the tunnel, and you keep snuffing it out." He was referring to my continuation of parenting, when I suppose he felt I should be done. Yes, I realize this my not be convenient always, or easy, but the hurricanes in Haiti are not convenient for them yet they bend with the trees under God's mercy. It is my time to bend too. The good news is, through all the challenges that lie ahead, I am convinced my new babies will drown in that ocean of God's love right along with me.