We see the images and wonder how anyone could survive this. And yet...people did.
You've heard the unbelievable stories. Here are two that especially touched my heart. I think these two people have much to teach you and me.
One is Romel Joesph, a Haitian-born music teacher...who was born blind, or so sight-impaired that he is legally blind.
Imagine yourself pinned beneath rubble for eighteen hours, unable to move, not able even to see. Imagine knowing all along that while you were on the third floor when the earthquake struck, your pregnant wife had been on the first floor and you could not know whether she was alive or dead. (She did not survive.)
Romel Joseph told interviewers how he got through that wrenching time. I caught his story while driving and later looked it up in the N.P.R. archives. Here's the gist of how he survived the horror.
"I knew I could not allow my mind to wander and to keep thinking only about rescue. So I decided to keep a strict schedule, hour by hour. I set aside the first twenty minutes for prayer and meditation," Joseph says. "After that I focused my mind on favorite pieces of music I knew, one at a time. I forced myself to concentrate, note by note, as precisely as if I were directing an orchestra. In effect, that took me to another place in my mind. For that time I did not feel my pain, did not allow myself to wonder whether help would arrive.
"Hour by hour, that's what I did. First the prayer and meditation, then the music. So I not only killed time, but I reminded myself I was not alone. I told myself I was brushing up on my directing skills and I mentally escaped the space where I was."
Romel Joseph is no stranger to tragedy. He founded the New Victorian School in 1991, in Port-au-Prince, to teach music to Haitian children. That school burned to the ground exactly ten years to the day before this earthquake once again leveled the school.
Friends dug him out after eighteen hours lying there with his leg pinned and crushed under concrete. Surgeons also repaired his severely fractured left hand, but they cannot say whether he'll regain full function...and what is a violinist without a left hand that works?
But Joseph plans to rebuild as soon as he can. As he puts it, "I need more than an earthquake to make me stop my work in Haiti!"
I think this man shows us how in the midst of fears and troubles we can deliberately turn our thoughts to other things, to people we love, to happier times and, yes, to God. Our situation may not change, but our ability to cope will.
Another rescued woman in a television interview (couldn't find her story in print) told what enabled her to hang on. She said something like this. "I lost everything except what matters most," she said, holding up her Bible. "I could not move, there in the dark, so I searched my memory and remembered some Psalms. I kept repeating them over and over, especially Psalm 46. God brought me through this, praise be, and here I am."
For thousands in Haiti, this was--and is--the worst of times. Thank God most of us will not be caught in anything like that earthquake. Yet I think these two accounts teach us a lot about surviving our own fears and sorrows without crumbling under the load.
Perhaps you love Psalm 46, too. I often find myself going back to my old, dog-eared Bible, to reread sections I've underlined in the past. Always, that includes these favorite verses of Psalm 46.
Psalm 46
1 God is our refuge and strength,
an ever-present help in trouble.
2 Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way
and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea,
3 though its waters roar and foam
and the mountains quake with their surging...
5 God is within her, she will not fall;
God will help her at break of day...
10 "Be still, and know that I am God;
I will be exalted among the nations,
I will be exalted in the earth."
11 The LORD Almighty is with us;
the God of Jacob is our fortress.
Selah
God's peace and blessings,
Lenore
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