How's Haiti?

A buddy of mine asked this profound question today, via Facebook..."How's Haiti?"

It's crazy.  I don't think I've ever been anywhere where I'm more affected by "the tyranny of the urgent"- those things that pop up that demand your attention and keep you from doing more important things.  When something pops up here it quickly becomes a major ordeal.  I suppose a lot of that is spiritual warfare.  The enemy can't be pleased with what's happening here.  It's hard and frustrating but being here seems very significant most of the time.

I could cite a lot of examples.  A day of important shopping is planned.  We have responsibilities to pick-up ministry supplies like food or lumber or concrete or whatever.  Then spur of the moment a vehicle won't start, or is overheating, or someone forgot to tell me they need a truck for some other purpose.  Suddenly the whole schedule is thrown off.

A kid gets sick on one of the sites and necessitates dropping everything to go to a hospital, which is an all day affair at best and often an overnight affair.

The Generator's Air Filter gets grossly clogged-up to the point where it won't run.  That necessitates a night without power and half a day of searching for the right part.

All that stuff is actually important.  It's of utmost importance that we take care of participants...that we get them to a doctor if they need to go.  It's really important to get parts to make the generator run or keeps the trucks going.  It's important to respond to a team that's running low on bread or water.  But anything that isn't planned for nearly shuts us down elsewhere.  The urgent knocks out the planned every time.

It's not that we aren't flexible- a word that anyone who's been on a Mission Trip is familiar with.  We're beyond flexible here.  We're Fluid.  We roll with the punches.  But the planned-for stuff is what we want to be about.  We want to be about serving our teams and serving our Haitian Church Partners.  We want to honor our meeting times with them.  We want to be timely in delivering ministry supplies.  We want to pick-up participants and deliver them at appointed times.  We want to be safe and smart.

AND we want to have some "margin" built in and the discernment to be able to be "Fluid" when we know the Holy Spirit is directing us beyond our "planned-for" stuff.  But when the Urgent comes, the margin is wasted and maybe too often so is the opportunity to join God in what He is doing.

I'm not one to see a demon behind every discordant note.  But you can't deny the spiritual warfare here.  I remember hearing somewhere this axiom: "If the devil can't make you sin, then he'll make you busy"!  It's a good thing to be busy with the "work" of ministry, but sometimes busy is the enemy of productivity and fruitfulness and intimacy with God.