Haiti Thoughts - Isaac

A Brief devotional thought from one of the students on our Haiti mission trip. 

I'm tired. We're all tired. That's just what happens in Haiti. You get tired. You spend your whole morning and most of your afternoon, almost 5 hours, working on either construction, which is physically taxing, or teaching, which is mentally taxing. I've done both, and they are equally difficult, in different ways. 

This year, I am on construction, and God is teaching me one of the more difficult lessons to learn: I can't do it on my own. How did he teach me this? Well, my first two days, my job was to scrape the building. It's concrete, so the paint won't go on very well unless we scrape the bumps off of the building. It was me and my Haitian friend, Leekou. He took the ladder and went up high with the scraper. I went low, but we only had one scraper. So I used a pickaxe head. 

We spent hours scraping away on the walls, and we finally finished. I was so happy to be done. But then, I realized that we hadn't done the inside. In total, we spent 10 hours scraping the walls, and when we were done, my arms were dead. But all the way through, I just kept praying "Lord, let me finish this strong. Let me work to the best of my ability." And it worked. I could've never done that on my own. And when we were done, I thought "finally, I can relax." Except for one tiny detail: VBS. We still had to run the camp. 

So I prayed again. Time and time again this week the Lord has given me energy. I've been exhausted. But through my exhaustion, the Lord has been strong. 

This reminds me of second Corinthians 12:9, where Jesus tells us "'my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect through your weakness.'" 

So trust in him, because if you trust in yourself, it all falls apart. But if you trust in Jesus, it all falls into place.