Sabbath Reflections.

I’ve been thinking hard lately about Sabbath rest. Coming into this adventure, I wanted to be really intentional about safeguarding my Sabbath- taking time for rest and being with my Lord. But when you’ve got 40ish hours of work to do in a week, along with laundry, cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping, helping host short-term teams when they’re here, and you compound all that with the fact that we're not supposed to be out after dark taking care of errands and such…it makes finding a day for such rest tricky, if not virtually impossible.

Yet God commanded us to a Sabbath of rest. So I’m stuck, trying to figure out what exactly I’m going to do. In the States, it seems that everyone’s over-worked, over-stressed state of affairs is a product of pride and the need to be better and work harder than the Joneses. Here, it’s more an issue of simple math- there aren’t enough daylight hours in the day/week. And for many Haitians, who barely make enough money to eke by, any hour when they can be making money is an hour not to be wasted on frivolous things like rest.

It’s such an interesting paradox: Haiti is a slow culture, but often by necessity and not by choice- we don’t have the means to make things run more efficiently, so we resign ourselves to waiting for things to happen. Yet the culture of busyness that I know from life at home (always-working-never-stopping-advance-advance-advance) is alive and well. What to do?

I get frustrated with these things- both for my own life and on behalf of the Haitian people, particularly those that I know and care about. I see how hard they work and how often they work, and I tend to project my own weariness onto them. But in the midst of this, I am still struck daily by the beauty in this country. Everywhere we go, sweet children wave as we pass by (our whiteness makes us a novelty, and if we wave back, they are delighted). When we drive through the village where our school is located, the community kids who attend the Kids Alive school will run alongside our car, or wave and shout our names. Haitian friends will come over to our house after a 12+ hour workday to help us change a flat tire. We’ve been in Haiti long enough that hardly a day passes when we don’t see someone we know on the road, either driving or walking. Honking, waving, stopping the car in the middle of the street to have a chat or let a friend hop in- all of the above happens on a regular basis. And it boils down to the fact that I feel like I’m part of a family here- loved, accepted, welcomed. In this way, Haitians do the Kingdom of God much better than we North Americans. Would that we could take a page out of their book! 

A big part of what makes Haiti so wonderful. I mean, come on. Look at these faces!