This summer.

A small, two month chunk out of my life, yet so much has happened and so much has changed.

Isn’t it crazy how much can change in a moment?

And after two months of wonderful, heartbreaking, amazing, powerful, sorrowful, emotional, tough, simple, difficult, enraging, joyful, moments my life has drastically changed. I don’t know exactly what it was or when it was, but over these two months God has been working something great in my heart and my life.

And all those little moments, all those little changes have amounted into a slow process of Him chipping away at my heart and making it more like His. Breaking my heart for what breaks His, giving me righteous anger at the injustice I see, filling me with inexpressible joy.

This summer has allowed me to love deeply, give completely, and trust more fully. I’ve become a better leader, a better listener, a better friend, and a better follower of Jesus Christ.

My biggest desire this summer (maybe not fully initially, but looking back I can now say this with confidence) was to grow so much closer to my Lord and Savior.

I have had to fully rely on God to get through this summer, as hard and as challenging as it was. There’s no way I could have gotten through this summer on my own strength and that has allowed me to learn how to fully lean into God and how to trust. Also I’m learning how to give Him all the praise and glory for the crazy, amazing things He did accomplish this summer and all the things He still has in store for me and for Haiti.

In Haiti, it was so much easier to make God a part of the everyday. We interns and Miss. Beth worked on praying each morning together to help fight off attacks, come together, and be filled by the Spirit to accomplish what we had to do each day, but could in no way do on our own. We leaned hard on each other for encouragement and prayer support and leaned into the Word to get through the days that challenged and stretched us. We acknowledged that unless we spent time with God each morning and started off each day right, there would be no way we would survive or accomplish any sort of effective ministry.

It’s not that ministry was so difficult or so terrible, it was just so big and amazing that there’s no way we could do it on our own apart from God. He refilled us and replenished our strength and love and joy each day and we trusted Him to provide in these ways. We relied on Him to give us just what we needed each day, nothing more, nothing less.

One of my favorite stories in the Bible that I thought about a lot this summer is the story of God providing manna from heaven for the Israelites in Exodus 16. Here’s just a little glimpse at this story and what it meant for me this summer. The Lord commands the people to go out and gather an omer each, a set amount that would provide enough food for them that day. Each family, no matter how much they gathered, always had enough. Nothing more, nothing less. God wanted them to rely on Him to provide and He came through with a miracle. Food from heaven is miraculous enough but then God allowed it to provide for each person’s needs, each day. They couldn’t point to themselves and say that they had gathered enough, that it was their hard work that provided for them, because everyone had the same amount regardless of how much they gathered and it was enough. And God told them not to keep any leftovers because each day He would provide enough for them. Though God provided, they still had to trust Him and follow by living out His words in their lives by going out to gather each day. They had to trust that what He said was true and that He really would provide enough for them.

Enough for the day they were facing, enough for what they needed today. Enough for now, kounye-a.

The All-Powerful God who worked the miracles of the Old Testament is still alive and working today. He can still accomplish miracles in our lives. Each day God can provide anew for our needs. Exactly what we need, nothing more, nothing less.

He will give us the strength we need to keep going when we don’t think we can take one more step. He will give us the joy we need to smile and greet one more person when we feel ourselves growing tired. He will give us the love we need to lavish on one more precious child when we just want to focus on ourselves.

God has provided just that this summer, just what we all needed, each day just enough, just when we needed it. He’s literally carried us through this summer and done immeasurably more than we could ever imagine and none of that was of my own skill or ability, it was God alone. It was actually in my weakness and inability that He worked the miracles. And He deserves and gets all the praise for all things miraculous that occurred this summer.

Mesi Jezi pou tout bagay!