Prayers for Haiti

Once upon a time, we spent some time in Haiti. I remember having to use bottled water for everything, even for brushing your teeth. I remember the big walls all around people's houses, keeping crime out, or trying. I remember a sea of black faces on crowded streets, every morning and every night, and the explanation that in Haiti almost everyone sleeps with a roof over their head, but lives, for the most part, outside on the street. The weather, after all, is commodious--when it isn't horror. And, oh yes, poverty shadows everywhere.

Weathermen claim that once again Haiti is in the cross hairs of a developing tropical storm, this one named, obscenely, Grace. I'm sure some scientists would say that hurricanes do some good somehow, but finding a silver lining in yet another destroyer to hit the island would take some doing. Haitians most certainly need grace, but not this one.

As many as 1300 Haitians died in a 7.2 earthquake last Saturday, an earthquake that destroyed 7000 homes. Poverty-stricken Haiti still hasn't fully recovered from the last one, which was actually smaller and killed 220 thousand people eleven years ago.

Some call Haiti a failed state, a place where the only government isn't a government at all. Not a month ago, President Jovenel Moïse was murdered in a plot whose mystifying origins are still being investigated. For decades, armies of volunteers and hundreds of millions of dollars in aid of every sort seem to have accomplished little to improve the quality of life. The airport is, almost always, filled with American teenagers in matching t-shirts, church groups coming in and going out. They were everywhere.

From here, an assassination, then a massive earthquake, and, soon enough it seems, a murderous hurricane make even imagining how people are doing this morning on the island impossible. 

I remember watching people four and five abreast flowing through the streets in Port-au-Prince, remember also how difficult all those folks made it to get anywhere in a vehicle--how madly chaotic everything seemed. Right downtown in the city, four or five lanes of traffic inched through an intersection with no red lights. 

And I remember the morning rush filled with children, scores of them, each with a uniform representing the school they'd attended. Something about those neatly-dressed kids, hundreds of them, kept hope alive. 

I remember thinking how those kids too were all praying that morning, talking to the Creator of heaven and earth, as were a gadzillion others around the world; and right at that moment I remember seeing a vision of God almighty a hundred times bigger than anything I'd dreamed of before, because He is a loving God and he does hear us when we pray--I believe those things. Right then, I couldn't help thinking that he's a dispatch operator like no one or nothing imaginable. He loves those sweet choruses of Haitian children fully as much as he loves my grandkids. That's how big he is. That's how many prayers he dispatches every single hour of every single day.

A man from the coastal town of Las Cayes, where the quake devastated homes and businesses, told ABC News, "We only have Jesus now. If it wasn't for Jesus, I wouldn't be able to be here today."

But you can't help but wonder how much the Haitian people can take. A failed state, a murdered President, a monumental earthquake, and now a hurricane named Grace? It takes preposterous faith to roll out Romans 8:28 in Haiti. 

Maybe, just maybe, Grace will swerve north or south as if listening to the urgent prayers of all those kids in Port-au-Prince.

We can only hope. 

And pray.