Skip to main content

2012 Haiti Team Interview Eight: Rita

Two words defined Rita's experience with Haiti: "prayer" and "mom." These two words represented Rita's purpose and her character. Indeed, from the struggles she faced to get there, one could say they represented her very life.

While some of us struggled to find our personal contributions to this trip, Rita's became clear. Her prayers resonated with us, appealing as she did with such strong conviction to a God she knows so personally. To be sure, there were moments of uncertainty in these prayers, moments when she could have been embarrassed by her conviction to pray them; but her God was bigger than her fears, a truth so rooted in her that you could hear it in her very voice.

Like so much else that is meaningful in life, this conviction did not come easily. Her story in Haiti began with a doctor's diagnosis of a brain tumor. She was told she would need surgery to have it removed, a surgery that was scheduled for May 1st and that would require at least four weeks of recovery time. This put Rita's trip to Haiti in danger, given that we were scheduled to leave exactly one month later, on June 1st.

What happened next would send shock waves throughout our group and the church at large. Two weeks before Rita's surgery-- a Wednesday-- she underwent a routine MRI to take note of the tumor one last time. That Friday, Rita received a call from her nurse stating that whatever tumor was there was there no longer, and that everything about her brain was normal again.

This was her testimony, showing her that when God calls you to something, in her words, "nothing can stand in your way." As a result, she has had the opportunity to share her story with an array of people: doctors, coworkers, family, and acquaintances alike. Beforehand, she found others asking her how she could leave with the problems she faced, problems that included not only this tumor, but also finances and an array of other challenges. Many were doubtful, in fact, but Rita arrived in Haiti both healthy and fully funded.

One could see, then, the source of Rita's strength. It is a strength developed through hardships, faithfulness, and prayer. It was in part through these experiences that Rita knew she would be changed on this trip. Concerned for the daughter and family she would leave behind, she was forced to trust God again, this time to care for those she so dearly loves; but she met this concern with a knowledge that God would remain true to himself, that he would be faithful to her.

This peace about the trip allowed her to learn another, equally important lesson from her time in Haiti: it taught Rita her purpose as a mom. We saw this in her compassion for the orphans in Haiti. It was Rita, in fact, who broke through the barriers of language and emotional distance to counsel one Haitian boy who tended at times to be unkind toward the others. At first relatively silent, this young man opened up to Rita more and more as the week unfolded, until it seemed he trusted her.

Events like these showed her how purposeful her role as a mom truly is, a lesson that she brought back home to use in her place as a single mother. For Rita, in fact, God had weaved a passion for motherhood and a conviction in prayer into a single, new tapestry whose emblem was most distinctly his own. More than anything else, Rita's story is God's story, a story of healing, faith, and purpose.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Persuasion

At different points in history, governments have devoted men, women, and resources to try to persuade others to their side. One significant example of this occurred in Germany under Adolf Hitler. Hitler knew how important it was to make sure the German people were on his side as leader of the country. One way he did this was by controlling what people heard. Specifically, near the beginning of World War II, Hitler made it a crime for anyone in Germany to listen to foreign radio broadcasts. These were called the “extraordinary radio measures.” He did this to ensure that Germans weren’t being persuaded by enemy countries to question their loyalty to Hitler. He knew that a German listening to a radio broadcast from Britain might persuade that German to believe that Great Britain was the good guy and Hitler the bad guy. This was so important, in fact, that two people in Germany were actually executed because they had either listened to or planned to listen to a foreign radio broadcast (one...
Post a Comment
Read more

Comparison

Psychologists and others have studied ways in which we compare ourselves to each other. One man named Leon Festinger argued that we tend to compare ourselves to other people when we don’t know how good or bad we are at something (like football or playing the guitar). One way we do this is when we compare ourselves to those who are not as good as we are, to protect our self-esteem (called “downward social comparison;” example: we’re playing basketball and miss most of our shots, but we feel okay because a teammate wasn’t even given the ball). Another comparison we make is when we compare ourselves to others who are doing much better than we are (called “upward social comparison”). When we see others who appear to be doing better than we are, we can respond by trying to improve ourselves, or by trying to protect ourselves by telling ourselves it’s not that important. There was a study published in 1953 by Solomon Asch, who asked students to take part in a “vision test.” The par...
Post a Comment
Read more

Thoughts on Academic Purpose

If I could tell my students how to choose a path of employment, I would emphasize that no effective writer, historian, athlete, musician, or scientist became such without dedicating themselves to some goal. For that to have taken place, however, the respective expert must have had a firm idea about why they were doing what they were doing. In other words, they must have had purpose. Karl Marx spent countless hours in English libraries, I would share, to understand the functioning of society in order to improve it; while Isaac Newton often went without food to gain a firmer grasp of the science of motion, and eventually revised that science. They did this because they had a clear purpose, a real reason for doing what they were doing that would affect others around them. I would communicate that whatever passion students tap into, it should be embarked upon with that kind of clear goal in mind. While they may not know which passions they have yet, I would emphasize that school is a time ...
Post a Comment
Read more