Driving with the Windows down!

Travelling in Haiti with the windows down

The air conditioning in our truck broke just as I was setting off on a trip to visit our teams in Verrettes and Gonaives (About 3 hours north of Port-au-Prince). I took it to a mechanic to see if it was a simple fix, but alas, he said I had to find a part in order to fix it.

So we have been travelling with the windows down and it is amazing what I have been noticing.
First of all, I have been missing the smells of Haiti. Some smells are terrible, as you can imagine in a country without a good sewer system. But some smells are quite refreshing, like when we pass by fields of rice, or groves of trees along the road.

Right now we are passing a diesel truck with an oil leak and black smoke pouring out of it, and that smell is really bad.

Then there are the times when we slow down and pass through an outdoor market. The smell of raw meat baking in the sun mixing with the scent of human sweat can easily turn your stomach. But the smell of fritters cooking in oil or fresh fruit can make you hungry.

You have to remember that we live in a capital city, and lately traffic has been terrible. Right now we are in a traffic jam, and every time we get some shade, we get a little relief from the hot sun. Normally I sit in the front seat with the A/C blasting, but now I sit in the back where there is more shade, and I can move from one side of the car to the other depending on where the sun is.

Everyone here is saying that September is much hotter than last year. I don’t think you can get much hotter than 100% humidity and 90-100 degrees.

It also makes me appreciate the importance of wind. When we are sitting in traffic in the hot sun and there is no breeze, the heat is oppressive and sweltering.

I’ve learned in my 50 years of life that there is often an important lesson in suffering. To quote C.S. Lewis ““We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”

So I thought about how the Bible personifies the Holy Spirit as wind in John chapter 3: ”5 Jesus answered, “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit. 6 Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. 7 You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born again.’ 8 The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”

Just as the heat was almost unbearable when there was no wind to cool us down while driving, so it is with us without the “breeze” of the Holy Spirit working through us. Our spiritual lives become stale and unbearable without the “breath of life”, the Holy Spirit that Jesus breathed on his disciples in John 20: 22 “And with that he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.

When we grieve the HS it is like closing the windows in a car with no A/C. We suffocate spiritually and our spiritual lives become unhealthy.

So if your spiritual “air conditioning” is broken because you are not listening to the Holy Spirit, get it fixed by confessing your sin and tune into the Holy Spirit and you’ll feel a lot better!