My day started early this morning. I left Greenville at 3:30 this morning with Robin Bell. He was driving me to Atlanta to catch my flight back down here to Eleuthera.
After I was picked up at the airport this afternoon by Ryan he told me of the events he had scheduled for us to attend this evening. We have had torrential rain since shortly after I landed. First we had a meeting for the reconstruction of the Clinic here in James Cistern. We had 12 people in attendance. After being there just a few minutes, I realized how much I miss this community when I’m not here. I was listening to the conversations around the room thanking different ones thanking God for the rain. A lady standing next to me was sharing that she was thankful for the rain because her water buckets were almost empty. She said she couldn’t afford to by the water from the processing plant & God new she needed rain. Nobody looked down on her for that they just added that they do that to sometimes if they can’t buy water. Something as basic as water & people can’t afford to buy it. We live in a nation of plenty.
Before the meeting got started, another lady picked up a phone & started yelling into it that a lady needed to come to the meeting. After she hung up, I guess she caught me staring at her & she said very calmly, there’s water in the lines from the rain, you have to yell. What do I know?
We opened the meeting with a hymn which brought a smile to my face thinking, where else in the world do we do that?
After we left the meeting in JC we drove to Palmetto Point to attend a prayer meeting at the Haitian Nazarene church. They were hosting a prayer meeting to pray for their country. The church had about 100 people in attendance both Bahamian & Haitian. It was the most moving thing to hear Bahamians up in front of the church praying for Haiti, knowing the prejudices this country seems to have for the Haitian population. The final person was asked to come forward & pray. He was a Bahamian man who opened his prayer by saying a few words in Creole which was so moving to all of the people there. For a Bahamian to learn Creole, is monumental to say the least. At that point, he asked us to all join hands & pray. What happened next, I can only describe as what it must have been like to be at the day of Pentecost. I heard so many different languages praying out loud at once to the same God. It was more than prayer it was worship. I heard over & over the Haitians saying Papa Papa. To hear someone call God Papa seemed so intimate & personal. In a culture that isn’t based on keeping track of time, the prayer meeting lasted until nearly ten o’clock. Nobody was in a hurry to rush off to catch the latest reality show on T.V. They were there to spend time with God & each other. Each person came up to say God Bless you & often something else in Creole to us before they went home.
