Heaven Will Be a Dance Party

One of my favorite nights at Mission of Hope is Tuesday night because Tuesday night is the weekly worship service at the church. Okay, I know that might sound strange that of all the things I could love about Haiti that I would love going to church, especially if most of the service is in a language I barely understand. Most people I know at home think church is boring, and to be honest, a lot of times I think church is boring, but I recognize that is really our own fault. Especially if you are like me, and you sing at the top of your lungs at a concert or in your car- you sing songs about falling in love and about summer's freedom and about how Billie Jean is not your lover. Because if I can sing and dance with joy about things like that, and I am bored at church, well, I must be forgetting who God is and what He has done for me.

Haiti doesn't forget who God is. Haiti does not forget the houses that fell and the heaps of bodies that filled the mass grave in this very village. The survivors do not forget that God spared them, and they are grateful for their lives. A man named Rob came this week with his two daughters from Texas. He had not been to Mission of Hope since he came with a medical team two weeks after the earthquake, and he told us about how the patients begged to be taken on stretchers to church so that they could sing praises to God. People who were dying. People who were losing limbs. People who had lost everything. It's sad how we who have been given so much have a hard time praising the God who has blessed us. It's tragic really and almost too ridiculous- that we find it easier to sing about beer and kissing and ladies with fat butts than to sing about Jesus.

Back to my story about Tuesdays... Simply put, Tuesday night at church is a joyous dance party in the name of Jesus. There is singing and praying and crying and dancing, but all I know is: it is real. Real pain. Real joy. Real love. Real life. And there are few places where I have felt closer to heaven. Sometimes I look around and think about the lives of the people here- the poverty, the memories of last January, the illness, the death, and the filthy, hungry babies with bloated bellies, and I grieve for them. On August 17, I will board a plane and return to my comfortable life, but they will not. I can change the channel, they cannot. This is their life, and it is real. But I think about how their pain has brought them to the cross of Christ- closer than I might ever be. They know Jesus like I have never known Him. They sing His praises with a depth from which I have never sung praises. I think about how I will return to a world where people tense up a little when they hear someone say the name of Jesus and where people roll their eyes about going to church and where we surround ourselves with our comfortable things and our pleasure-filled lives and convince ourselves we do not need Him. And that is when I grieve for us.

In his book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, Donald Miller writes about overlooking Machu Pichu after climbing the intense Inca trail. He describes the elation of arriving: “The pain made the story more beautiful. The story made us different characters than if we'd showed up at the ending an easier way. It made me think about the hard lives so many people have had, the sacrifices they've endured, and how those people will see heaven differently from those of us who have had easier lives.”

So this is why I love Tuesday nights--- Because for a few hours I can see heaven more clearly through the eyes of those who have seen true suffering. I have caught a glimpse, and I can tell you it is beautiful.