Haiti: A Symphony of Sound

My family of four is together for the first time since Christmas. And it’s joyful, but there never seems to be a spare moment for me to just retreat, to just spend quiet, alone time. That concept seems to be lost on my family. Suddenly I feel this creeping anxiety and frustration that I can’t get away from SportsCenter at night or the Price is Right in the morning. I listen to my dad chow down on his potato chips at midnight mixing with the constant pounding of ocean waves. And as my patience seeps out, I remember how God used sound in Haiti to renovate my heart. I believe I just have surface
scratches that need touching up, but it’s my foundation that is
crumbling and causing those scratches. God is relentlessly trying to fix my
foundation and I’m still busy using dry wall to cover the cracks. As an
introvert living at Renmen Orphanage for a month, I struggled to find
any alone time, any silence. It was nonexistent. I even wrote a blog
about it in my journal, but never bothered to type it up or post it. So
here it is, a snapshot of that noise and why God did it to me:

Noise.

Living in an orphanage for a
month. Kids ranging in age from 1…to 70? All living on an acre of
property. God has taken me–the one who insists on
finding silence at home for hours daily to a place where noise is
inescapable.  Young children who shout their prayers at 6am, teenage
girls who chatter and squeal and gossip. Teenage boys who say little,
but who use their cell phones as mini boom boxes. I sit now in the
“quiet� room, where I will be left alone. But even here, I hear the
children shouting their alphabet and numbers in class outside the
window. The chickens cluck loudly, and baby Oliver cries. The sound of
a woman sweeping, and music in the distance–could it be band practice
again at the neighbors? Ahh, and there’s the familiar ice cream truck
remake of “My Heart Will Go On� playing on the road. It’s only 7 am! In
the middle of the night in the still of my tent–the one place where
silence should be attainable–dogs howl their loudest and provoke the
roosters to begin crowing at 1 am! Every night. Without fail. And to
top off the sounds of nature, more music plays off in the distance–a
night club is in full force on a Sunday night? I swear there is a
constant soundtrack that plays around the clock in Haiti!

And I found myself for the
last few weeks asking God to just give me a fleeting moment of silence.
Some solitary confinement, just a brief moment to listen to Him
uninterrupted. And it came to me this morning: all this noise is God.
He has surrounded me, enveloped me, given me nowhere to escape His
voice. He is so much louder here, showing me that He is here. In
everything. He controls the wind, His hands are sweeping that broom.
His thumbs are banging on the drum set next door. I’ve spent so much
time feeling that I need to find a space of silence to hear Him when
all along He has put me in this place of eternal cacophony so that He
can show me that He wants me to be a part of His symphony, to embrace
that the most beautiful music I’ll ever hear is right now, flooding my
ears. And I am being called out of my own silent revolt to chime in,
because He loves me so much that this song I hear now, He wrote for me.