I’ve spent a lot of the last few days thinking about suffering: all different kinds of suffering. It started when we arrived in Haiti on Saturday evening.
Once we crossed the border and into Haiti we switched from a coach bus to a school bus that barely held all 48 of us plus our luggage/daypacks. We were super squished in with packs in the back and people sitting on top of seats and all over the place. It was superhot, humid and sweaty and dust was coming off the sandy roads and in through the windows. We drove through Port au Prince, the capital of Haiti, and all we saw was devastation. I thought I had seen a 3rd world country in the Dominican, Tanzania, Bolivia and Panama but this just hit a whole new level – nothing has compared to what I see in Haiti. There were tent cities all over the place and little “houses” made of tin roofs and tarps from Samaritans Purse wrapped around for walls. These homes were lined with piles of garbage that reeked. The smell was just putrid and I felt like I was barely getting oxygen into my lungs through the stench. I had such a hard time trying to wrap my head around how these people live in this environment and how this suffering is normal for them. It’s almost as though my mind won’t actually let me merge the image of children running, laughing and playing along the street with the image of tarp shelters, cement rubble, chaos and the landfill surrounding me.
And here we were, sitting uncomfortable and hot in the school bus while our two worlds began to merge together. As I watched out the window, trying to take everything in, I saw a hardware store named "Merci Jesus Depot” which means Thank You Jesus Depot in Creole. All I could wonder was how are these people able to be so thankful when this is how they have to live? How could it be when some of them barely have anything to be thankful for but life itself? Some of the people I saw are certainly orphans or widows or lost everything after the earthquake in 2010. I don’t know if I could still be thankful while enduring all that suffering.
Then there are the founders of Be Like Britt Orphanage that we visited on Monday. Their 20 year old daughter came to Haiti on a school trip in 2010 and 3 hours before the earthquake hit she sent a text to her parents saying how she had fallen in love with the children in Haiti and wanted to come back after finishing school and start an orphanage. Later that day she lost her life in the earthquake along with many others. Through tragedy, grief and suffering her parents decided to take on their daughter`s dream of building an orphanage in Grand Goave and we got to see it in action.
Then there was Valentine’s Day which I spent being fairly ill. I wanted to be doing ministry but instead I remained at the compound where we are staying and tried to keep my food down and stay awake for what seemed like very few hours of the day. I kept thinking about how I was suffering (yes barely in comparison) and how unpleasant it is being sick in an undeveloped country and how I yearned for the comforts of home. I thought about how my mom’s memorial service has been three years prior and how she had suffered as she struggled through her battle with cancer and then how we suffered and grieved when she left this life.
Yesterday I wasn’t quite feeling 100% so I stayed back from ministry again and decided to spend the day recuperating physically and spiritually because God took that opportunity to teach me something about this suffering I seem to have been dwelling on lately.
I got to Romans 5 and it hit me as the perfect reading for my last few days. Paul talks about how we can have hope because God`s love has been poured out into our hearts. We can see glory in our sufferings because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. (Romans 5: 1-5)
Also, we can take comfort in knowing that good will come from our sufferings. If we are children of God then indeed we share in the sufferings of Christ in order that we may also share in his glory once we leave this life. Our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. (Romans 8:17-18)
Remember: Just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ (2 Corinthians 1:5)
