Healing

After a slow, quiet Saturday evening, we sent the kids towards bed, with instructions to wake up ready for church the next morning.

These being our ready-to-jump-into-anything kids, though, many of the girls spent the next several hours talking to new friends on the compound and huddled up on their mattresses, going over and over the language they were learning. Who needs to sleep when you can pour yourself into a new people and culture?

All of the teenagers had spent the day asking question, after question, after question, trying to process and to understand and to prepare themselves for the next week. And then, God showed up in a direct answer to prayer, somewhere during all of the question asking, last year's team began the slow process of going over events that happened 11.5 months ago and putting the pieces back together in a way that made sense.

The 2011 trip was rough in a lot of ways - although still very, very good - and, yet, these precious, amazing, resilient kids came back. They came back with old wounds still hanging out in the open and old triggers dancing just under the surface. But, they came trusting that God was good, and that whatever He sent them into would be for His glory.

This year, before, and as, He allowed them to be gently broken in new ways, He glorified Himself through their healing.

"Then your light will break forth like the dawn, 
    and your healing will quickly appear;
then your righteousness will go before you,
    and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard." Isaiah 58:8

God showed up as they tentatively voiced their hurts and worked together to sort the beautiful from the messy, the holy from the human. He showed up as they promised each other that this year would be different. He was present as they concluded that different would not mean easy.

And, the team that was left at the end of the conversations was healthier, more confident in their ability to do whatever needed to be done, more determined to be fully submitted to their God, and more in tune to the people around them. What had started as their our weakness became His strength.

One of the other leaders simply shook her head in wonder near the end of the trip and declared, "These kids are almost Haitian in their resilience."

I think that they would take that as the highest form of a compliment!