There is a large part of me that wants to see this time of
adjustment as Kevin Costner did in Dances with Wolves. I see the scenes in
front of me and I am playing a beautiful soundtrack in my head as I narrate
what I see to myself in a calm and relatable voice.
An incidence like that happened quite clearly in my world
just this afternoon. Katie and I were trying to compose our weekly message to
Saint James parish, when two little hands and a bit of grunting made way for a
boy’s smiling face through our second floor window.
His name is Ari.
Ari said he was hungry and we replied so are we!
How,
humbling it is to be in a place where we are struggling to figure out something
as simple as where can we buy bread!
Thanks Be to God, Ari
appeared. After a couple of tries at asking him where he lived and where we
could buy food I just mimicked eating and he nodded his agreement. He then started
walking down the mountain and I looked at Mallory and said a little prayer as
we followed the small boy lead us through town.
He took us about a mile from our home straight to a woman
sitting on the corner of a street. She simply had a sack of bread loaves in front
of her wrapped in a large bag, sitting and waiting for customers to come. With this
incentive of food I simply opened my wallet that had various colorful and very
well worn bills in it, all of which I could barely distinguish from one
another. I handed her what I felt would be the correct amount to buy 10 small
loaves, about a dollar and a quarter. She nodded her acceptance.
We said a prayer of
thanksgiving that without any knowledge of the town, of the language, and the
money, we navigated a path down the mountain to retrieve wonderful sustenance guided
by the boy from the window. I rewarded the precocious youth with a small roll
and journeyed further down the road to show Mallory where our single men’s team
of missionaries lived.
I would love to say that this experience was a one-off approach
to the new town we are living in. But a month later as I still compose this initial
impression of L’Asile, I am brought back to so many things that I still struggle
with.
The language is still a struggle. Yes, we are learning many words and
some phrases, but the overall flow of the language still seems to allude my
grasp.
And we still face the continual struggle to easily provide healthy and hearty
meals for my family, rather than just rice and spaghetti to fill our bellies and
stop our hunger pains.
Christ Jesus, you have humbled me so much in this journey as
a missionary here in Haiti. In ways that I never felt would be a struggle have
brought me down to my knees in prayer. So many times have I felt like cursing
this place in my anger and have succumbed to that temptation more than I would
like to admit.
Only for my prayers to eventually rise to my lips to ask for more
of his grace to be able to see how this struggle makes me see how I HAVE to
rely on HIS provision for my family. No longer can I easily see a way forward
in self-reliance, a trait that has, through gritted teeth, gotten me so many of
the attributes and victories that I count as feathers in my cap.
Lord this is
hard, but Your worth is so much greater than all that I can sacrifice in this
way to try and bring about my surrender to Your Will here.
-Matye
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