Marcio is a young man with a lot of passion for life and was on staff with us for 3 months. One day it was raining those torrential tropical rains that Haiti gets, so he got some people, pulled out a couple of spare tarps, laid them out on our concrete driveway, and with some soap suds in the mix there was a gargantuan slip and slide in Haiti. After a little bit, Marcio had to attempt the surfing move and, with a running start, stayed standing all the way down the slide – until he had a good amount of speed, lost his footing, and landed on his head hard enough to temporarily lose vision in one eye.
So there I am an hour later at the field hospital with him and Troy, sitting in the trauma/E.R. tent which pretty much consists of 3 beds, 3 medical volunteers, and a lot of donated supplies of varying sizes and brands. Marcio got checked out, they put an I.V. in him, and we’re waiting on the liquid to get into his body. Suddenly someone comes in saying they have 10 or so car accident victims with them, most of them bleeding and hurt badly. Now, in a situation like this at home, this is a problem for someone else, someone qualified, medical types and their hospital system. Not in Haiti. In Haiti you’re all in it together. You move the unable out of the way and grab whatever able bodied people you can until someone more qualified does show up. So there’s Mark – he hates hospitals, he’s edgy about needles and I.V.s, and other than knowing you put pressure on gunshot wounds from watching too many action movies, he doesn’t know a flippin’ thing about making blood and bones stay in their rightful places. But he’s got a pulse, he can probably follow directions, so guess who gets recruited for medical duty?
Now, all I did was unpack a few I.V. nozzle thingys from their plastic wrap and attach them to some tube type thingys after unpacking them too (you can tell by my medical jargon how much skill I picked up in those 4 minutes). Really, it was like unwrapping a few McDonald’s happy meal toys, and before the blood and adrenaline showed up more doctors arrived and Troy and I were asked to make some space. But when that doctor looked at us and said ‘Give me a hand over here,’ I didn’t know what was coming next or if that request for help was going to extend to when the bleeding people would inevitably get carted in. I thought I was about to be in one of those trauma scenes in one of those medical shows I hate – you know, where there’s quick camera movements, and cutting off clothing to figure out where the wound is, and lights shone in the eyes, and a bunch of numbers being called around the room you’re supposed to make sense of but really it’s a trick cause all you understand is that when they say it quickly and tensely it’s bad and if they say it with a sigh of relief it’s good – the scene that, if I’ve been conned into watching the show, is my cue get up and refill my popcorn bowl BECAUSE THEY’RE ALWAYS STICKING NEEDLES IN PEOPLE OR CUTTING THEM OPEN! Why are these shows so popular?
So anyway, that possibility is going through my head, and yet it’s not with the edgy feeling or deep loathing I get when watching those shows, it’s simply looking at what needs doing. It was entirely a ‘this might come next, just so you’re not surprised’ kinda thing, and the other side of my brain goes ‘Ok, cool, thanks for the heads up, we’re ready for it.’ I’m thining this way because, at this point, I’m ready to just do anything, since EVERYTHING happens in Haiti and you just do a little piece of it all. You might bandage small wounds, move rubble, cast out a demon, design a roof, learn how an I.V. goes together, preach to a few hundred people, re-wire a house to the city power grid, baptize someone, teach kids a song in the street, and/or learn the signs of a concussion and how to check someone for them every hour throughout a night…I’d say that describes an average week in Haiti. In fact, that could have been one of my lighter weeks in Haiti. It doesn’t matter if you’re ‘qualified’ for a task or if you came to Haiti to do it, by the end of it you will be qualified and it turns out that is one of the reasons you came to Haiti, you just didn’t know it. That’s the beauty of how God works.
Benny, one of our field directors, gave me this tid-bit: In 1st Samuel there’s a little passage about Hannah, Samuel’s mother, seeing him just once a year when she’d come to give her annual sacrifice at the temple, and that every year she’d bring him a new robe. Just one. Now I’m no parent, but I do know that kids grow a LOT in a year, so if Hannah is giving Samuel one robe to last a year he’s going to be swimming in it when he gets it. Sleeves need rolling up, wrap that belt an extra time around the waist, you get the picture. At some point in the coming months it will start fitting nicely though, get comfortable and easy to wear. Probably, then, by the time she comes back next year, the thing is getting rather snug, even restrictive. As we grow in our walk with Christ we’re constantly getting new robes – new ministries, new rolls, new seasons to take us through more spiritual formation. At first it’s unfamiliar, too big, clumsy, and it even causes us to trip up a little; you get used to it though, it shapes you and grows you into new areas of faith and then you’re running with it, moving freely and naturally, finding the fullness of life and guiding others in it; eventually though, you’ve outgrown what was – that old roll may even feel a little restrictive as you feel the coming of the next steps, the new phase or season of life where what was once new and big becomes just a natural part of something even bigger – a new robe from your Father. I think we sell ourselves short by not taking on new stuff we think isn’t ‘what we do’ a lot of times. So…don’t avoid it just because it’s too big for you – it won’t be by the end.
