Anxiety and small but mighty blessings

I wasn't able to get this posted last night, so here is the post from yesterday.

Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Today has been a very long day, but one full of so many perfectly placed blessings. My God is an awesome, faithful God!

When the alarm went off at 3:00 am, I was not too overly excited. And, let me tell you with humble honesty that even as I opened my eyes and put my feet on the floor so very early this morning, I did not want to come on this trip. I had every negative, ‘what if’, and ‘why’ thought imaginable. I again argued with the Lord that He should find someone else, that I am not the right person for this work. I have had spiritual battles before, but none this intense in such a condensed period of time. With each flight I wanted to run, I wanted to give up and go back home. Traveling alone today didn’t make it any easier, and that just fueled the fire of the battle. But while I was being pelted with a thousand reasons to turn and run, I could only find one reason to keep going – but that one reason trumped all of my reasons for why giving up was a good idea. God had sent me. For whatever reason He picked me for this journey. I know that every day I have to decide if I am going to follow Him or if I am going to turn and walk away. If I only follow Him when it is easy I am not depending on Him, but am instead depending on myself. I have seen enough of God’s hand at work on this journey that I am getting pulled in deeper and deeper, seeking to get closer to Him. Once you experience the presence of God in such a profound way, you never want to be apart from it. But back to the events of the day...

God gave me reminders throughout the day of how faithful He is and of how close He stays to those who seek Him. My first flight took off at 6 am, and it wasn’t very full so I was fortunate to have my little row to myself. After we had taken off and been in the sky for a little while, and while I was struggling with the anxiety of wanting to run, I looked out the window…I have flown a lot, but I have never seen anything like what I saw this morning. The clouds were indescribable! It was like we were soaring over a whole world that laid below. The variations and colors in the clouds were magnificent, and the shapes of the clouds in the distance looked like mountains. Everything around us was clear and you could see the sun rising as the dark blue night sky faded into an amber horizon at the edge of the clouds, as far out as you could see. There were large areas where the clouds had pulled away so that the space between them, with the color of the early morning sky, looked like large bodies of water. What a breathtaking picture of the beauty God gives us to behold. I sat and wondered as I gazed out at that window, if anyone else was looking. I love the connection you feel with God when you are admiring and taking in His wonderful creation. He knew I needed to see that this morning. I needed a reminder that He is so much bigger than my small struggles.

While sitting in an airport waiting for another flight, I had a brief texting conversation with a very dear friend who reminded me that Jonah tried to run too, and that while God may not have a big fish waiting for me, He does have plans for my life and that He has already placed so many people, from all over the world, in my life to carry out His plan. I was thankful for this piece of counsel, and it reminded me of the trip our team took to Haiti earlier this month. Arnie delivered a message on Jonah to children at Black Mountain. I immediately remembered what he had said that night about not being able to run from God. What are the chances of the connections between these messages? Ok God, I get it. Keep going and do not run.

On my flight from Fort Lauderdale to Port Au Prince I had a challenge with my seat, which also happened on another flight I had recently from Port Au Prince. Other Haitians, who did not speak English, were sitting in the wrong seats. I attempted to help them figure it out, but it was easier to just sit in one of the seats that they were supposed to be in. This change in my seat placed me beside of an older Haitian gentleman. He was very pleasant, and sat there by the window doing word search puzzles in English for most of the flight. After the flight attendant passed out the snacks and we began eating, this nice man picked up my garbage for me and put it together with his garbage to give to the flight attendant. Again, very pleasant. We didn’t speak much on the trip, but I learned that he was a US citizen now and was coming back home. As we began flying over Haiti, he quickly got my attention and had me look out the window as he pointed, and with the excitement of a child, said, “Look! It’s Haiti!” Yes it was, and it was beautiful. Thank you Lord.

After I arrived, it took quite a while for the bags to get to baggage claim, but thankfully I was not approached by someone who wanted to ‘help’ me find them. I got my bags and headed outside, at which time I was greeted by a red shirt who I let take my bags – often much easier than fighting to try to do it yourself. To my surprise it wasn’t Edmond that picked me up, but instead Sherrie, Micah, and Rachel were there! Micah has really done a good job of learning to drive here in a relatively short period of time.

We arrived back at Christian Light and got my bags placed in room. The new rooms on the 3rd floor are great! And Ms. Jacqueline did a great job of setting up the room. All of the people here are so wonderful! Three of the little boys here grabbed one of my bags and together carried it up two flights of stairs. They are always so helpful! After quickly getting things inside, Sherrie and I walked down to see Madame Bertha about paying the rent on the house. I had typed up a receipt for us to sign showing the payment was made. Well, while going over the receipt with her, there was more confusion around the three months being covered by the initial payment. The original contact stated that I would pay an initial payment of $3,000 to cover the months of August 2013, June 2014, and July 2014. I know it is odd, but this is sometimes the kind of thing that happens when you are negotiating and setting terms through interpreters and some of those things are hard to understand. One of my worries has been that we need to raise funds to cover September rent by the end of August. Well, I give the Lord credit and praise again. The confusion of the contract when we were trying to pay the rent led to an addendum to the contract. The revised terms are that the $3,000 payment made today is for the months of August, September, and October 2013, so we are paid up through the end of October! Thank you Lord!!!

I have to give credit to Mr. Richard here at Sherrie’s who helped with translation in talking with Madame Bertha. We were also able to figure out how the electricity payments will work. Bertha will receive the bill and she will then give it to me to pay. This means I don’t have to worry about setting up any kind of account or establishing service! Praise the Lord again! We will, however, need to get an inverter and have it installed so we have more stable electricity. Otherwise the majority of the time we will have none. That will be about $5,000 and we have that on our list lf needs for the near future. We also talked about ordering water and have that pretty much figured out. We will help pay the cost of a water truck since Madame Bertha’s cistern only holds ½ of a truck, she outs the other half in our cistern.

On one of our walks back to Sherrie’s we ran across a young, white, man walking down the road with a couple of plastic bags from a store. His name was Gabriel and he is from Germany. He is in Haiti (for the first time) working on his thesis, studying the roads/transportation infrastructure here. You never know who you are going to meet in Haiti!

We had a wonderful dinner of spaghetti and salad and fresh mango. Then I sorted through my luggage to get out the items I brought for the house and to settle in to my room. Then as I began writing this post, I found something in my Bible that was the perfect sign for the end of the day. On our last trip to Haiti, Susan Forman had put together and gave out tiny ziplock bags to each of us that contained a message and a tiny mustard seed. The message was Matthew 17:20 – He replied, “Because you have so little faith. Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there’, and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.” Thank you Susan! You had no idea when you made up this bag that tonight it would give me reassurance on a day of spiritual highs and challenges. We never know how our acts of kindness will ripple beyond our original intentions. Sometimes we aren’t intended to, but sometimes God gives us a glimpse! (Here is a picture that sums up today: my Bible, keys to the house, and my mustard seed):

I brought along a book to read on my flights, and it is one that I have read and used a lot lately. The name of the book is “Lead Me Holy Spirit” by Stormie Omartian. This is an amazing book that talks about the different ways we are/can be led by the Holy Spirit. One of the sections about being led to see purpose in God’s call on your life is fitting for today and I want to share it with you. In this chapter she writes:

When God calls you, He will put a dream in your heart of what needs to be accomplished. When God puts a dream in your heart and gives you a vision for the future, He doesn’t want you to try to realize that dream or fulfill that vision in your own strength. He wants you to surrender to Him completely, and then He will bless you with an anointing of His Spirit and a new release of His presence and power in you. God will equip you for what He has for you to do. But you must seek Him for it…God wants us to have high expectations of Him too. What He gives us to do is always far more than we can accomplish on our own, and He will make certain we are convinced of that. He will bring us to a place in our loves where we recognize that there is no way on earth we can do it without Him, but we can expect that with God, all things are possible. And because of that, He can enable us to fulfill our calling.

As the hard rain pelts the tin roof over my head and the wind blows a cool breeze through the room, and as I hear laughter from two beautiful young ladies next door, I am humbled and thankful for a day of blessings beyond anything I deserve. Goodnight from Haiti!