"Everything happens for a reason"

"God has a plan"

These are a few phrases that I hear all of the time but never really put much thought into them, but during my first trip to Haiti these phrases began to be my mantras. It started when we were working down in a local village to fix a road (read my blog "Do You Know that Jesus Loves You?" if you want to know what exactly we were doing. The people in charge of the road project had ordered a bulldozer to come help us move the rocks down the river. On the first day, the dozer simply never showed up, and then on the second day the dozer showed up but it wasn't the right kind of dozer so it couldn't help us. After both of these days we were very disappointed. Each time the dozer didn't help that meant that the project was going to take longer to finish. On the third day, the Haitian government decided that they wanted to fix the road themselves and they kicked us out. So, while the first two days the dozers not showing up seemed awful, it was actually a blessing. The dozers not helping meant that the organization did not have to pay for them. If they had helped then there would have been a lot of money spent just for the government to kick us out before the project was finished. If that's not a blessing in disguise then I don't know what is.

The second circumstance that helped me to learn that God truly does have a plan when things seem to go wrong was on our last night in Haiti. My team and I went to a small resort on the ocean to stay the night before we had to go to the airport early the next morning. The plan was to hang out all day, enjoy the ocean, and then have worship on the beach that night. When we got our room keys we realized that one of them said "conference room" on it. It turns out that the resort had run out of rooms and four of us would have to sleep in the conference room. We didn't complain and in fact thought that it was cool because we had more room than everyone else. Later that night as it got close to time for our worship session and it began raining which meant that we couldn't worship on the beach. Some of us were very disappointed as worship was something that many of us enjoyed and we wanted to end our trip to Haiti by worshipping the one who brought us all there. That's when myself and one of the interns realized that the conference room was big enough for my whole team to fit and we were able to have worship in the conference room. It was not the ideal circumstance, but worshipping in that conference room with my team while it stormed outside was one of the most powerful things that I have ever experienced. So while that was a very small example, it was that night that I began to see some of the things that we had originally thought were bad (or just weird) actually turned out to be for the best.

The biggest moment that opened my eyes to connecting seemingly bad circumstances with great outcomes occurred on my way home from Haiti. When we reached the Miami airport and were going through customs and such, myself and two of my teammates got separated from the rest of our team. We did not have a phone and I (due to an issue with seats double booking), did not have a ticket to my flight out of Miami. The people at the Port au Prince Airport had told me that I would need to go to customer services outside of my gate in Miami to get a new ticket, and because I had never travelled alone before I did not realize that I needed a ticket to even get to my gate until I tried to go through security and they explained it to me. My teammates went through security and left me. I being the worrier that I am began freaking out because I was alone without a phone, and I didn't know my flight information. Thankfully a nice security man found me and told me that he was going to help me figure everything out. He walked me to the ticket counter and cut everyone in line so that I could get back with my team as soon as possible. While we were waiting for my ticket he talked to me to try to calm me down. He asked me why three minors were travelling alone together and I explained that we were actually travelling with a group of 26. He of course wanted to know why on earth 26 people were travelling together so I began talking about Haiti. I talked about what I had seen God do there and how he had changed my life. While I was talking the man interrupted me and said "I'm sorry, but I had to stop you because I can feel Jesus speaking to me through you right now and I really needed to hear that today." God gave me the opportunity to minister to that man by putting me in what I considered a scary circumstance at that point in time.

There were several other circumstances throughout that trip that allowed me to connect the bad events to good outcomes, but those three were the ones that allowed me to start making that connection. Everything truly does happen for a reason, even bad things. If we would open our eyes to see the bigger picture perhaps we would be able to see more of those bad circumstances being blessing in disguise.