One of my all time favorite shows was "Extreme Home Makeover". A few years after Krystle's brain tumor we actually applied to the show! A favorite moment of the one hour program is demolition. Every time you wondered what great idea Ty Pennington would have to take an old wreck of a home to the ground. His ideas seemed endless, and left you cheering for the family every time. But have you ever wondered at your reaction if you were watching a wrecking ball headed toward a home on a TV screen, and realized it was your own! Somehow the show had made a mistake, you glance out the window, and suddenly a force so great you cannot conceive is driving through every wall, every room, taking out with it the electrical, the plumbing, drywall, trim, chandelier's, cabinets, furniture, pictures, everything you held sacred about your home environment is crumbling before this terrible and nightmarish force. In stunned silence you to try to process what just happened, clouds of dust roll around you, you cough, you gag. Someone made a mistake, a wrong calculation, and you are the brunt of an unfortunate oversight. Doctors have cut off wrong limbs on the wrong people, removed the wrong organs on the wrong body. Massive mistakes that there is no recourse for except to live with for the rest of one's life. The right plan at the right time removes great evil, great pain, and replaces those things with bright hope and a future. Matter of fact, God even tells us in Jeremiah that it is His plan for us, to have hope and a future. This week the cruel wrecking ball of circumstance blasted through our lives, our plans, our goals. It shattered our expectations like some kind of crude joke. Laughter faded into solemn faces, you smiled because you should, not because you wanted too. We adjusted, however roughly to the changing face of time, we stalled, nose-dived, re-booked, and in January we will re-try. What did we miss? Better yet, what did God miss, did He get the address wrong? Perhaps someone changed their address and mistakenly used mine. The cheering halted, reality charged into the room and ravaged a plan. Robinson consoled me by saying: "You know American's, they have their schedule's! Sometimes God plays with our schedules!" I don't like it, but He's right. So much of planning, of preparation, of praying. God comes in and says, however rudely, "Go home!" We went home. We had no choice. There was no plan B. Just plan "wait"! I tend to lack a little in the patience department. If you go back and read my first posts from Haiti, you will see my struggle, I have come a long ways! I am not planning to go back to that place again where I might be forced to relearn some of those lessons, but really now, does God need to do this? Apparently so, and I have to be okay with it. We have to be okay with it. It's really not our mission, it's His. We are His ambassadors, and He really doesn't need us at the embassy right now. We have been momentarily decommissioned from this leg of the journey. I have thought much about this across this past week, wrestling with disorientation, confusion of emotions, and trying to re-boot the system. God is doing His part, I am trying to do mine, the rest of the team is doing the same. Meanwhile, I glance at a picture like this one and think, do I really have it so rough? Here is the epitome of inconvenience, nay, even sheer havoc. What of me, of my situation, of my plans? They really don't matter laid next to this. What are the plans for this little one? Where is his "Extreme Home Makeover"? The wrecking ball seems to have caught him in it's swing and deposited him in the middle of nowhere. I love perspective, and sometimes despise it at the same time! So what now? We are moving forward with some of the projects on the ground, we are still endeavoring to bring the tent out of customs, some team members are recovering from head colds, some are recovering from broken hearts, some are just recovering in general. As the week has progressed we have forwarded needed funds into Rob, we have sent ahead for cases of Bibles. In our absence, God is not limited. There are lessons here for both the Americans and the Haitians. God makes NO mistakes. His timing is impeccable, and if He allows the wrecking ball to swing through the circumstances of the structure of our lives, He is seeing something that needs to go that we simply cannot see. So onward and upward we go, adjusting and believing, trusting and praying, submitting and surrendering to the omniscience of the Almighty who knows all things, holds all things, restores all things. Blessings tonight from (surprise!) my bedroom, and not St. Marc!
P.S. They held a baptism at the ocean today! Many are being saved, it would have been cool to be there for that, it was probably one of their surprises for us! God is good all the time!
