Second Mile Haiti

Welcome to our blog! This is a place for us to keep friends and supporters up-to-date with the latest 'Second Mile' happenings! Check in often. Things are moving fast!

Thursday, June 21, 2012

Little Miracles

Little miracles, we've all had em. Your mom calls and you mention you're a bit under the weather. Unbeknowst to you she calls up her prayer group and you don't know how you've done it feeling so sick and everything but by twelve o'clock you've done five loads of laundry and cleaned an entire house.. Healed. You give God a little shout out for back up before going into a meeting with some super snarky and unflexible people and you come out of the meeting thinking, wow, that went rather smoothly.. Helped. Just when you think you'll have to resort to donating platelets, again, you find $20 where you'd least expect it... nah just lucky.

But serisouly...

When you think about how the Creator of the Universe steps into your life to intervene and engage then those little miracles we experience when we pray are really not so little at all, they are actually great spectacular things that should be given lots of publicity.

We've got a few, I mean a fair amount, of people praying for us right now. And we're pretty serious about this prayer business ourselves. I'm going to go out on a limb here and try and make Jesus more famous then Joseph Kony by calling these miracles what they are: HUGE footprints of God moving in our lives. Now I'm no advocate for yelling but I'm really tempted to retype that last sentence again in CAPS! God moving in your life is big time people. It's time we start talking about it.

Kelinise: What do you do with an 18 year old whose blood pressure is hanging out at 160/130? (For those of you less medically minded folks think HIGH and DANGER). Well you'd give her a second anti-hypertensive drug. What do you do if it still doesn't go down? Give her a third. And if its still high? A fourth and then maybe it's time to start praying for the kiddo. Miss Kelinise, our little, but not young, diabetic friend was going on her 7th day of hospitalization for high blood pressure when a group of people decided to make a committment to pray. Not for her specifically, but for Second Mile Haiti, for Jenn's trip to the States, and for big miracles to happen that would advance our project. 30 days of focused prayer starting yesterday. They asked for feedback, for specific requests. And only hours after mentioning Kelinise I got a call from her saying that her blood pressure was down to 140/90. Oh Lord, in Heaven, I never saw it coming. After 7 days I thought those yucky high numbers were here to stay and that I was going to have to tamper with the monitor if there were any hopes of freeing the poor girl from the hospital. Today, day 8, she was officially discharged with a blood pressure of 120/80. Perfection.

Sick, tired, and anti-social: Sometimes I wonder how I have any friends. I love to be by myself. Sometimes, I'm flat out not a fan of talking to people and I'm an expert at awkward. Which is why I hated that today I was not by myself at all and that while trying to "get work done," I had to talk to people. There was no Jenn to buffer my awkwardness and pick up the slack. I just wasn't in the mood for the various situations and conversations that were happening amongst our employees. Ha, wasn't in the mood!? Who do I think I am? And of course I wasn't in the right mood. God had given me some pretty clear direction about what sort of mood I needed to be in to get through the day. That morning, while journaling and praying I asked him for insight into the day to come. He said there would be challenges but he was offering to help me get through them. In order to sail through the bumps I was going to have to adopt an attitude of dependence. I was going to have to see people through his eyes and view situations with his perspective. The miracle? I remembered this around 3 pm and the whole day wasn't wasted. It was like a light switch turned over and the feelings of frustration vanished like darkness at sunrise. Ha, my mood! The miracle? God doesn't write you off for being a huge screw-up, but lets you on for the ride even if you are a few hours late and a few dollars short. God completely took over around 3 pm and I had an amazing rest of the night.

Jenn reads her first non-fiction book: Jenn's been travelling for two days now. Not sure why? read here. Before she left Haiti I was packing her suitcase  backpack because frankly I'm just better at that then she is, and she reminded me to throw in Kisses for Katie, a new book written by a brave young Jesus-lover in Uganda. I stayed cool and collected on the outside but inside I was doing a party dance. This book encouraged me in a huge way and I really wanted Jenn to read it. But you can only push that kind of thing so much. Besides Jenn reads horror, mystery novels so a book about a real life nice person was going to be a bit of a stretch for her. But, of her own accord she decided that this trip might be the perfect time to read Kisses for Katie. I chatted with her a little bit during the end of her final bus ride today and she admitted to me that she had almost finished the entire book. And I quote "I think I was supposed to read this on this trip." The miracle? 1. Jenn read something other than James Patterson. 2. God used the book to encourage Jenn and remind her that's He's big, awesome, and just like he provided for Katie and grew her ministry, he's got something up his sleeve for us too.

Maggie: Maggie is a dear friend of ours. She's 50-something and her husband is in his 60s. I was shocked to see Maggie at the hospital the other day and saddened to hear that her husband was in such bad shape. Through a combination of high blood pressure, stroke, and diabetes he is now unable to see, walk, eat, or talk. "He went from a man, standing on his own two feet, to a little baby," Maggie said to me in dismay. The little miracle came for me at the hospital this evening. I was there to pick up Kelinise. Went I went upstairs to the adult unit she wasn't there. I checked in the peds unit where she sometimes goes to visit a younger patient with diabetes. Not there either. I then checked back behind the unit where families do their cooking, bathing, and washing. There she was but she didn't hear me calling her name. Then I noticed Maggie sitting by herself, staring into space and looking terribly sad. I jumped up next to her and asked the elephant in the room question: how is your husband today? "He's not good at all. I thought he was going to die last night," she admitted. We kept talking. She asked about Jenn. She said the famous Haitien phrase Bondye Konnen, God Knows, which is reserved for times when you need to aknowledge that something is hard and you don't understand why. I told her that Jenn was good, and gone actually. And that a big group of people decided to pray for me while she was away so that I wouldn't get discouraged. She said that was good but that she didn't think I would get discouraged. She told me that "my daughter," Kelinise, had made a great comeback. I told her that that same group of people had prayed for Kelinise too. And before I left I told her that that same group of people would pray for her husband. Oh the smile on her face. The miracle? God ordained that moment. He knows Maggie and Louisnel and loves and cares for them. So much so that he put a group of praying people together at this exact time to love and support them from afar.

Free cash: Oh and some guy did give Jenn $20 on a bus today. (But that's just a bonus and doesn't actually make it into the list of top God moments.)

*Some of this post may get a little silly but it's an attempt at honesty and an attempt to give God glory for his faithfulness and for answering our prayers in strange and redeptive ways.*

The moral of the story, God is doing big things through a bunch of little miracles and a bunch of people who have committed to pray.


If you like to get in on this 30 days of prayer action please send an email to Katie at kgregg319@gmail.com.
Katie is awesome and nice and really good at writing emails. I didn't ask her if she'd be willing to forward our prayer emails along to you but something tells me that she'll be okay with it. ;) Or, leave a comment and we'll get you connected.


1 comment:

  1. WOW! great post. thanks for sharing all these little miracles. His eye is on the sparrow. found you via the wiegands link up and am excited to follow along xo

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