Please Pray

This morning I received a text. Pray, Mom. Sickness and disease is attacking the relief workers here.


My second daughter is near the outskirts of Joplin.


A week ago she heard that a group was going to work in Joplin and the surrounding areas to help in the relief aid. She signed up to volunteer for this weekend without much hesitation. She is an ER technician, and Joplin will look much like an ER room after a code.


She will see the ravages of the twister first hand—not just view it through the lens of someone else and posted online. Those photos, no matter how good, are flat. There’s no sound. Nothing to hear. Sound carries the weeping and the pain. She will hear and see.


And I know her. She will push up her sleeves and be in the middle. Right in the center of whatever they are doing. She will consider no job too small, no job beneath her. She will hug the elderly; she will rock the young. She will look into people’s faces and her empathy will take over. She will cry and shake her head and then begin the next project. Her problem solving lets-get-our-hands-dirty attitude will take over. And I wish I were a part of her team working right beside her.


She will come home depleted physically, but renewed in her mission. She will be able to explain some of what she saw, but most of it will remain inside wrapped around who she is. Even her precious fiancé will not completely understand (and I am praying he gets closer to understanding this time more than ever before). She doesn’t just feel for others—their pain and sorrow becomes intertwined with her own. She enters into the sorrow and it moves her to action.


In August my oldest daughter will walk the ravaged, wrecked and forgotten streets of Haiti.

She will be assaulted with the carnage of poverty and the chaos of concrete. She will cradle dark-skinned jewels in the circle of her strong arms. And she will want to bring at least one of them home with her. There will be one child (at least) who will quietly sidle up to the walls of her heart. And my daughter will mourn because she will be prohibited from carrying him home.


This daughter will see details others will not see. Her eyes will rove, seek and find the ones who are the most lonely, the most hungry, the most angry, the most afraid and the most needy.


I wish I could go with her. I wish I could trail along behind and beside her. I really wish I could be present when she squats down and looks a little Haitian boy in the eye. I wish I could be near when she has her first glimpse of the tent cities. But I will see them through her lens of vision. She will return with stories and images, and with her gift of words she will help me and anyone who reads her posts to see what she saw.


I tell these stories because they speak of the power and provision of our incredible God. He uses ordinary people to do extraordinary things.


And if you are reading this post please pray for these two young women. And when you do you become a part of their story.


Please pray.