Great Cloud of Witnesses

by Carolyn Arends


I was just four, my grandmother’s place
I knelt by her sofa and started this race
And now I’ve been running for such a long while
I’ve kind of lost track of the miles
Sometimes I press on, sometimes I look back
Sometimes I just lie in the road on my back
When I’ve got to get up and I don’t know how
I hear in the distance the roar of a crowd

It’s the great cloud of witnesses
Cheering me on each step that I go
It’s the great cloud of witnesses
They say the finish is worth every inch of the road

Moses is there, up in his seat
With my Grandad Wilfred, my Nana Bernice
There’s Abraham, Isaac and my buddy Rich
And I think they’re shouting "Don’t quit!"

So if you are tired, and your back is sore
If you’re not so sure you can run anymore
Then just take a moment and listen real close
Do you hear a sound like a heavenly host?

It’s the great cloud of witnesses
Cheering us on each step that we go
It’s the great cloud of witnesses
They say the finish is worth every inch of the road

It’s friends and relations and each generation of saints who believed
And received The Prize
They have looked into His eyes

It’s the great cloud of witnesses …

An Invitation

In Sara Groves' song "Add to the Beauty," there's a line that says, "And this is grace: an invitation to be beautiful." In every situation I can choose to respond in a beautiful way: with forgiveness, kindness, love. This weekend I quite often chose a different response. My husband was ill, the electricity was off most of the weekend, and there were various situations that annoyed and irritated me. Often I reacted in a petty, angry, definitely non-beautiful way.

I would really like to grow up before I grow old, but sometimes that doesn't look very likely. I want to accept that invitation to be beautiful, but so often I fall short. Forgive me, Lord. Forgive me, family. I'll keep trying.

Tears

Someone posted on Facebook last week that we should all stop crying for Haiti - what good does that do? Instead, the person said, we should reach out to our neighbors.

I totally understand the sentiment. It doesn't do much good for people to sit around saying how badly they feel. But I submit that we should do both: cry and reach out. Isn't that what Jesus did? He raised Lazarus from the dead, but He also wept.

For some reason, God made us as emotional beings. It seems that it would be more efficient if we didn't have feelings. I have read that scientists don't understand why we cry when we feel sad, or what purpose it serves. I just know that sometimes the tears come. As I see my friends and hear their earthquake stories and what they have gone through in the six months since, the tears flow. We grieve together because we love each other, and we love Haiti and we mourn the people and the places and the hope that are lost.

No, tears are not a substitute for doing something about Haiti, and I think we are all doing the best we can to contribute. But I have to believe that our tears are also acceptable to God, since Scripture tells us He keeps them all in a bottle. And maybe they are even "better than a Hallelujah sometimes."

Theme Day - Bright Colors

It's Theme Day at the Daily Photo blogs - and today's theme is Bright Colors. You can see thumbnails of the participants' photos here.

Happy New Year

In Haiti, the traditional meal on New Year's Day is pumpkin soup, or soup joumou. (Here's some information on why this dish is traditional for New Year's and also a recipe.) I love walking through our neighborhood on January 1st and smelling the fragrance of soup coming from the houses I pass. Like other New Year's foods in other cultures, this soup is supposed to bring good luck when eaten at the beginning of the year.

We dutifully ate our soup this year, and eleven days later our city fell down.

Because of my husband's childhood in Japan, we always eat mochi on New Year's Day, too. (Here's some information with photos.) Mochi is also supposed to bring good luck.

We ate our mochi this year, too.

When we were at the beach in June, my husband fixed us some mochi and we pretended it was New Year's Day. Today he pointed out that we have a joumou growing in our yard, so maybe we'll have to repeat the soup joumou as well.



Since we work at a school, we generally think of August as the beginning of the year anyway, but this year it feels especially important to have a new beginning. I don't want to pretend the last six months didn't happen - too many good things came my way in that time - but I do feel that we are starting again in a lot of ways. I am working on getting my head back into teacher mode by setting up my classroom and reading professional books (one I had apparently started reading before the earthquake, because it has a bookmark in it and underlining and notes in my handwriting). I can hardly remember how things used to be before January 12th, or what kind of life we had. I can't remember how I used to think about things back then.

Shall we call this 2010, Part B? Anyone want some soup?

The Children's Book

Book #42 of 2010 was one that I got for Christmas; it was still waiting by my bed when I got back to Haiti. The book is The Children's Book, the latest unpleasant, beautiful, convincing, complicated, brilliant book by A.S. Byatt.

This is the story of Olive Wellwood, a children's author, and the families connected to hers. Ultimately it is the story of the children who grow up in and around this complex, Fabian, morally confused family. It begins in 1895 and ends in 1919, and along the way we see the fabric of British society changing. Byatt is very good at evoking the mores of a certain time and place, and I learned a lot from this book about attitudes and ideas of this period. Everyone has secrets, all horrid, and in the end the carnage of the first World War lays waste to the group of children, who are adults by this time. Like Byatt's other books, this one includes ideas about art and creation and where stories and artifacts come from. Olive uses and neglects her children to create her writing; Benedict Fludd does the same to his for his pottery. Philip and Elsie have a mother who paints beautiful china plates, and ruins her health because of the lead in the glaze. Creativity in Byatt's books is never without cost.

This post is linked to the July 31st Saturday Review of Books.

The Ongoing Story of Heartline Hospital

Read all about it here.

Poetry Friday: Love's as Warm as Tears

I'm making a lot of progress in my classroom, and most of my books have been found. When the earthquake happened, most of the bookcases in both of our school libraries (elementary and secondary) fell down. Some of the books in my classroom were scattered but not too many. Shortly after that, the school buildings were hastily converted to sleeping space for doctors and soldiers, and the books from the libraries and my classroom (and other classrooms) were removed and piled unceremoniously out of the way. Many of my books ended up in the enormous heap that used to be the library, and fortunately most of mine were well-marked and easily distinguished from the library books. The ones from my classroom library have "23" written on them, and my personal copies mostly have my name in them.

As I've been rearranging everything, I've been enjoying getting reacquainted with what is on my shelves. I found a book on Wednesday called Poems, by C. S. Lewis. My friend Janet gave it to me for my 20th birthday, which was quite a while ago. (Thanks, Janet!) As I read through some of the poems in the book, I found this one, which I enjoyed at 20 and find even more beautiful now. In those years I have learned much more about love - all kinds of love - than I knew then.


Love's as Warm as Tears

by C. S. Lewis

Love's as warm as tears,
Love is tears:
Pressure within the brain,
Tension at the throat,
Deluge, weeks of rain,
Haystacks afloat,
Featureless seas between
Hedges, where once was green.

Love's as fierce as fire,
Love is fire:
All sorts - infernal heat
Clinkered with greed and pride,
Lyric desire, sharp-sweet,
Laughing, even when denied,
And that empyreal flame
Whence all loves came.

Love's as fresh as spring,
Love is spring:
Bird-song hung in the air,
Cool smells in a wood,
Whispering, "Dare! Dare!"
To sap, to blood,
Telling "Ease, safety, rest,
Are good; not best."

Love's as hard as nails,
Love is nails:
Blunt, thick, hammered through
The medial nerves of One
Who, having made us, knew
The thing He had done,
Seeing (with all that is)
Our cross, and His.

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

And Now for Something Completely Different...

What I needed was a change of scenery. And today I got it. I took a break from my classroom and went to spend the day with my friend Beth. An interest of mine that I haven't written about much here is helping women breastfeed. I am completely sold on how wonderful breastfeeding is for both mother and baby. Today I got to talk about that to a group of women who will soon have babies. I also helped with the charts for a series of prenatal exams, and interpreted for a post-partum checkup on a mom with a three day old baby. And Beth and I got to talk and reconnect. Tears were shed.


The women get a nutritious meal and vitamins to take home. Many of the women were gently scolded in their prenatal exams because they had actually lost weight since their last appointment. Is it because there is no food, or because they have no appetite? Most said the latter. Most also answered "yes" when I asked them if they were sleeping in a tent. The combination of pregnancy and the stifling heat in a crowded tent could definitely suppress appetite.


A mural in the birth center.


Women begin to gather for the meeting.

I started my class by asking the ladies what a baby needs. If I had been teaching this to parents with more resources, I would have used photos from baby magazines of all the "must-haves." These women have more modest expectations. They mentioned things like a mosquito net and diapers. Nobody suggested an Exersaucer or a Baby Mozart DVD. After our brainstorming session we talked about how a baby's greatest need is for his mother. This is true for babies born into rich homes and poor homes, mansions and tents. A baby needs to be close to his mother and God has given her the perfect food to feed him. We talked about colostrum, the first milk, and how it is full of antibodies and exactly what the baby needs in his early hours and days. The challenge is to keep these women well-fed so that they can nourish their babies. I am overwhelmed by the knowledge of how easy it was for me to mother my babies compared with the challenges these women face. And yet there is hope in seeing the fat, healthy baby being carried around by one of the teen moms in the program, a girl who came to the clinic after the earthquake and has never really left.


I also got to see the post-earthquake field hospital that I've been reading about since I left Haiti in January. It's mostly dismantled; the sign says "There's no clinic any more. Thank you."


Here's a wall inside the former hospital.

Beth told me that she is honored and humbled to know the patients from the hospital, people who lost family members and houses and parts of their own bodies, and still sang praises to God each evening. I am honored and humbled to know Beth and others who worked around the clock to help. Out of these terrible circumstances came a true picture of God's kingdom at work.

Jon Talks Books at Stuff Christians Like

Jon's post at Stuff Christians Like this morning made me laugh, because this has totally happened to me. You too? Someone recommends a book with a huge overblown promise about how it will change your life. You don't think it's very good at all. What do you do now?

Still Missing

You know, I'm trying really hard to keep this in perspective. It's not a human life that's lost. But in spite of all my searching, I still haven't found the binder with all my daily lesson plans in it from the last three years. I don't just use the same lesson plans year after year, but you bet I look back to see how I handled it last year, and what worked and what didn't. I have a self-created form that I fill out for each of my classes each week, and every semester I file away all of those forms in order in a binder. Do you think it comes naturally to me to be this organized? I assure you, it doesn't. I feel like I am going to be starting from scratch, and I am not at all happy about the prospect.

Thoughts over Lunch

After a morning of work, there's nothing like a great lunch. Haitian food is wonderful: spicy, with lots of garlic and oil. Today we had mayi moulen and sos pwa - corn meal and bean sauce. (Corey calls mayi moulen, which she spells the French way, maïs moulin, "Haitian polenta," and here's her recipe for it. She also has a recipe for sos pwa here.) It was delicious. There was a long line of people at the Snack Shop to be fed; right now there is a lot of work being done on campus - painting, fixing, electrical work - and everyone who works, eats.

It's not possible to eat a delicious lunch, though, without thinking of those who aren't eating today. Or those who will eat, but only because they will spend most of the day trying to make that happen. Before the earthquake there were plenty of people in this city whose daily job was to make sure there was food for their family. I've always thought it was interesting that a frequently-used Kreyol expression for eating is jwenn manje, "find food." As in a conversation with a Haitian friend where we were talking about getting toddlers to eat, something mothers in all cultures talk about, I guess; she said it wasn't such a big deal for kids who find food every day, but for children who don't always, the mothers had to be really careful to make sure they ate properly when there was food.

Here are an article and video, called "City of Zombies," that describe a little bit about what it's like to go out each morning in search of food for that day. And it's not as though that is the only problem the people in the story are facing.

Give us each day our daily bread.

Kingdom Comes

by Sara Groves


When anger fills your heart
When in your pain and hurt
You find the strength to stop
You bless instead of curse

When doubting floods your soul
Though all things feel unjust
You open up your heart
You find a way to trust

That's a little stone that's a little mortar
That's a little seed that's a little water
In the hearts of the sons and the daughters
The kingdom's coming

When fear engulfs your mind
Says you protect your own
You still extend your hand
You open up your home

When sorrow fills your life
When in your grief and pain
You choose again to rise
You choose to bless the name

That's a little stone that's a little mortar
That's a little seed that's a little water
In the hearts of the sons and the daughters
The kingdom's coming

In the mundane tasks of living
In the pouring out and giving
In the waking up and trying
In the laying down and dying

That's a little stone that's a little mortar
That's a little seed that's a little water
In the hearts of the sons and the daughters
The kingdom's coming

Tent Cities

Here are two articles about tent cities that I read this morning. This one includes photos of a settlement in front of Eglise St. Pierre (incidentally, where P's funeral took place). And this one discusses the permanent quality these cities are starting to take on.

John Seabrook on Adoption, and Me on Being a TCK

One thing I have discovered upon coming home is the huge pile of magazines to be read - six months is a long time to accumulate magazines, especially The New Yorker, which is weekly. I will never catch up with reading all of these.

There was one article, though, that I really wanted to read, in the May 10th issue, and this morning I finished it. You can read it online here, but for some reason I hadn't. It's an article about a Haitian adoption, expedited by the earthquake.

I had read about this article on adoption blogs, especially this one and this one. At that second link, you can find Seabrook commenting, and getting raked over the coals by adult adoptees.

The more I read about adoption, the more I realize how deeply painful it so often is. It seems that adult adoptees are good people to talk to if you are going to adopt, but there is so much defensiveness on the part of adoptive parents, in many cases. I can understand why. In fact, this is one of those situations where I can see everyone's point of view. Adult adoptees have much wisdom to share about what they went through, and adoptive parents are often invested in seeing their adoption as something which was meant to be, and therefore can't be fraught with pain. Seabrook says about seeing his daughter's picture and hearing her name, "It was fate." (Here are some more thoughts on that.)

But there's another reason that I identify so strongly with these adult adoptees, particularly those who were adopted internationally. As I read their stories, I recognize many elements of what it's like to be a TCK, to feel you fit in nowhere, as though both of your cultures exclude you. Talking about how painful that can sometimes be can be seen as being "angry" among TCKs just as it is among adult adoptees.

For a TCK as well as for an adult adoptee, you can feel pain and even anger about your childhood, while not negating the joy of it. Often adult adoptees fear hurting their adoptive parents if they talk about the loss of their first parents, or if they look for their first parents. Often TCKs have the same kind of fear, that if they talk about boarding school or frequent moves or cultural confusion, and how difficult it all sometimes was, their parents will be hurt.

The older I get, the more I am able to accept that both things are true about me.

Yes, I love being a TCK and wouldn't change it. Yes, I enjoyed boarding school and have many happy memories. Yes, I like being a person with two cultures (and the others I've added since).

But also, boarding school was hard and homesickness is terrible and I missed years with my parents. And also, it is not easy to be between cultures and feel like an outsider in both.

John Seabrook's daughter will have some similar feelings, perhaps. I imagine she will be happy to be part of a wonderful family. But I imagine she will also know pain: the loss of her first family; the departure from Haiti in frightening, traumatic circumstances, whether she fully remembers them or not; having dark skin in a white family. I hope she grows up knowing that it's OK to feel both, to accept that life is made up of the good and the bad, the easy and the difficult.

More reading: Tara has great thoughts on this.

Reading Update

Book #37 was Malcolm Gladwell's What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures, a book of essays from the New Yorker. Gladwell doesn't accept the conventional wisdom just because others say it's so; he is always looking beneath the surface of things. Do FBI profilers really know what they are talking about? Why do women dye their hair? What really motivates risk-taking entrepreneurs? Why doesn't someone make a better ketchup? What did the dog see? I found this book fascinating reading.

Book #38 was The Lady and the Poet, by Maeve Haran. It's the story of the poet John Donne and his wife Ann. Donne wrote some of the most famous love poetry there is, so I was curious to know about his own romance. The problem with books of this kind is that it's hard to know how much is imagined and how much is accurate, but I was caught up in their story.

Book #39 was a read-aloud to my son, The Pepins and their Problems, by Polly Horvath. The Pepins constantly have problems, mostly caused by their complete cluelessness. The author asks her readers to think of solutions and to send them to her telepathically. My son found this book hilarious and it made for perfect bedtime reading.

Book #40 was Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology, by Eugene Peterson. This was an absolutely wonderful book, so full of quotable passages that my copy is stuffed with little scraps of paper that I tore up to mark my favorite parts. Peterson explores how we find Christ in creation, in history, and in community. It's all about how we live, not some kind of ethereal "spirituality," all about how beloved we are and how we should love each other. Highly recommended.

Book #41 was a very different one, Anderson Cooper's Dispatches from the Edge. A friend bought me this book back in January when she took me to lunch. We had talked about Anderson Cooper's coverage of Haiti, almost none of which I had seen. I had heard a lot about him from my Haiti contacts, who loved that he stayed in Haiti when other reporters left, and that he came back. (Admittedly, some of what I heard was about how good he looked in his black T-shirts.) In this book Cooper explores some of what drives him. He goes back and forth between his childhood, the loss of his dad and brother, his early reporting jobs with Channel One, and his time in Sarajevo, Rwanda, Somalia, Baghdad, Sri Lanka after the tsunami, and most of all, New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. "The map of the world constantly changes," he writes, "new fault lines split open, new frontlines appear. I want to hurl myself into the storm."

This list contains an unusual amount of non-fiction for me. I think it's time for a good novel next.

This post is linked to the July 24th Saturday Review of Books.

Poetry Friday: Although...

“Although the wind ...”


Although the wind
blows terribly here,
the moonlight also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house.

by Izumi Shikibu, tr. Jane Hirschfield and Mariko Aratani

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Tower of Babel

A few years ago we lived in a house at the end of a quiet street. At the other end of our street it wasn't quiet at all; there was an intersection with the main road. At the corner, there was an enormous building. I don't have a picture of the way it looked, but it always made me think of the Breughel painting of the Tower of Babel.



Nobody seemed to know what the building was going to be. I heard a department store, a grocery store, an apartment building. But for years, nothing has been done on it. Many people were squatting there. It always, always had people in it.

Including when it fell down.

Today I took some pictures of the building that don't at all show how terrible it is.

Crashing

I'm crashing today. That's my friend June's expression, and it seems to fit. Since we got home to Haiti, I have been feeling so hopeful and upbeat, in spite of everything: the state Haiti is in now, the loss of my friend, the general sense that nothing will ever be the way it was before.

Today, though, it all crashed in on me. (And that's a bit of an unfortunate expression, given the circumstances.)

Solomon's story is much more representative of the way things are now than my story. It's the story of a life that was terribly hard before, and now is next to impossible. I have been talking to our employees at school and to acquaintances I meet in the street and other friends, and here are some of the things I've heard:

* We're living on the school property; our house was destroyed. (More than one said this to me.)

* Our house is OK; we're living in it. It has a lot of cracks, though. We haven't fixed them yet.

* Our house is mostly all right but the neighbor's house fell on it, so we don't want to sleep in there. We have a tent in front of it.

* Our house is fine and everyone is OK. Praise God! (Praise God, for sure, that there are stories like this. I don't know what we would do if everyone's story was tragic.)

My husband talked to someone this week whose wife and daughter spent five days under the rubble of the family home, and after they were finally pulled out, his wife died.

Then one of the school employees (the one who is living in a tent in front of her house) came into my classroom to talk to me about P, my friend who died two weeks ago. The employee wanted to make sure I knew about what had happened. She said all the workers from school had gone to the funeral (we weren't back in the country yet so we couldn't go), and that they had all cried and cried. P was helping so many of them, paying for school for their children, giving them clothes. They know they won't ever find anyone else like her.

It's too much to take in.

As I worked in my classroom this morning, I saw the desk calendar which I had just put out at the beginning of 2010. It's one of those big ones, with page for each month and a large square for each day. I tore off January through June and then was overwhelmed with sadness. How could I just throw those pages away? I couldn't, so I folded them and stuck them in the desk.

I put out my students' notebooks, resolving to let them decide what to do with them - those that return. I know that some of the kids will not be back and some of them I may never see again. I found the papers that I had just graded and was going to hand back on the 13th. I found the copies that I had made for the next day. Then I found a plastic tub of femoral angiography drapes. (I don't know what those are and I am pretty sure I won't be using them in my classroom this year.)

My mind is full of questions again. Why did this have to happen? Why are so many people's lives changed forever? Does God even care? I've heard and thought about a lot of answers to these questions over the past six months, and somehow today none of them satisfy.

Several years ago, one of my husband's students went to Spain and brought us back a figurine of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. I think it is made of pewter. It was on a bookcase upstairs in our house when the earthquake happened, and it was one of the few things in our house that got broken. (Jars and bottles in our pantry broke, leaving a big mess on the floor; part of a Japanese tea set broke; but in general, we were very fortunate.) The picture isn't the same as the one we had, but it's similar; the main difference is that ours is one piece, with both friends sharing the same pedestal.



I've tried to take a picture of ours, but I can't get a clear one. Our Sancho Panza is just fine, but our Don Quixote is broken off at the knees. Sancho Panza always did seem like a more sturdy fellow, whereas Don Quixote is more fragile, living as he does in a dream world and tilting at windmills instead of facing real issues. If I had to choose which one is more like me today, I would definitely have to say Don Quixote, broken off at the knees, lying on my face. My daughter said a few weeks after the earthquake, "My life is ruined, but I'm OK with that." I wouldn't say my life is ruined, but I do wonder if it will ever be free of the shadow of the earthquake, or if I'll keep crashing, again and again and again.

Wednesday

After a slow start yesterday, today I made loads of progress in my classroom. I moved furniture, which as every teacher knows is a task fraught with all kinds of implications. You have to think about how the room will be used, while at the same time being sure not to create areas where kids can get into trouble and you can't see them. You need them to have access to what they need, without having access to what they don't. And then, of course, there was the added complication of the bizarre items I kept finding: finger splints, a syringe, a gauze bandage, a set of scrubs (top size 3X, bottom size S), and some other things whose use I could not even guess. When I went prowling around looking for some of my missing belongings (more on that later), I found crutches and prosthetic legs.

After the earthquake, when I was in the States and heard that our secondary building was going to be occupied by soldiers and that the classrooms were being cleaned out, I asked my husband to be sure to rescue some of my belongings. He had someone pack the things up, and then that box was promptly lost/discarded/stolen. I knew about this months ago, and had let it go without too much difficulty. But today, for some reason, these items began to seem extremely important to me. I'm not proud of this. It's just stuff. With all the stories I have heard this week of suffering and loss, how could I worry about my few insignificant possessions? I think I'm past it now - I had my moment. But isn't it interesting how what we don't have any more suddenly seems so precious? What a reminder to cherish people, particularly, when we have them, but also to enjoy the things that God has allowed us to have for now. None of it is permanent.

Speaking of things God has allowed us to have, I was so happy to sort through my books today. My classroom library looks a bit the worse for wear. I'm not sure if it's because of all the tossing about the books have undergone in the last six months or if they just look shabbier to me because I've just been in the Land o' Plenty, where everything is shiny and new-looking. It didn't matter, though; the books are like old friends. I look forward to introducing these books to kids this year.

It is wonderful to see my husband and son together; they have been inseparable since my husband joined us in June. I didn't write much during the last six months about the miseries of parenting by myself, mostly because I was trying to protect my children's privacy. But I'll just say that my son, who is seven, needs his dad. Right now they are playing chess. It's a beautiful thing.