prayer

We met in Esther's office early on Wednesday morning to work out the plan for the next two days. Twenty patients would be coming to the ship who needed to be evaluated for surgery. Tumors and jaws fused shut and gaping holes in the roofs of mouths and finally D Ward was going to have people in it again, if only for the day.

We sat at the table, she handed us a stack of pink sheets, and suddenly it was a year and a half ago and I was sitting in front of this computer again, sending e-mails around the world deep into the night.

These were twenty of the same pink sheets left over at the end of the outreach last time we were in Togo, twenty of the people that you prayed for so faithfully. Every single one of them had the telltale black dot in the top righthand corner. Someone is praying. You can set this one aside. You don't have to carry them in your heart any longer; someone is praying.

It was so overwhelming to watch them file into the ward, to match each one with a black-dotted pink sheet. To know that in the time we've been apart, someone has been lifting them up to the Father.

Only ten out of the twenty showed up between yesterday and today, and of those ten we couldn't schedule all of them for surgery. One little boy, Koffi (he was three when I sent out his name, just in case you recognize it) has a tumor on the back of his head that might be a break in his skull. He will need to wait for his CT scan to be reviewed by a radiologist somewhere in the first world before we can make a decision, but we're not even sure if the surgery will help much, since he's already so developmentally delayed. One woman tested positive for HIV and we had to send her home because her body would have rejected the surgery we wanted so desperately to perform.

These are hard things to hear at the very start of an outreach, hard things to say to aunties and women with hope-filled eyes. But all day long those black dots in the corner of their papers sat as a silent testimony. This is not your load to carry. It has been given to Him, and He holds it in His hands.

As we welcome new staff and train new nurses and get ready for the mass screening day on the first of February, this is the reminder I so desperately need. None of us are in this alone. None of us has to shoulder the entire burden. We rely on each other and we rely on you, scattered around the world, praying for names on little pink sheets of paper.

We're in this together.

Oh, today. Today was perfect in such a typically African way. From start to finish, it was everything that I miss when the place is packed up and tied down to bolts in the floor. I could tell you so many stories, but I'll stick with two, both awesome for different reasons.

First the funny. The patient in Bed Fifteen has her sister staying with her to help care for her and her little baby. Sister is slightly demanding, albeit in a rather endearing way; she's definitely the bossier of the two. Yesterday in the evening Sister came to me and asked if she could leave for a little while this morning to buy shoes for the pikin. Despite the fact that said pikin is no more than three months old and nowhere near walking, I told her she could definitely be released for a while.

This morning she came to me when she was ready to leave, and asked for one of the many little pieces of scrap paper that live in the top desk drawer. I handed her one, not sure what she might need it for, and sent her up to the gangway with one of the translators.

I thought no more of it for another couple hours until I got a call from the gurkha guarding the entrance. Atypically, he was laughing pretty hard, and it took me a minute to realize he wanted me to send someone up for Sister. She arrived down to the ward a minute or so later, a bundle the size of a wadded-up king-size duvet wrapped in plastic balanced on her head, (definitely more than one pikin-sized pair of shoes in there, I'm pretty sure) and immediately started waving the scrap of paper at me and yelling in her tribal language.

If you've never been yelled at by a tiny little African lady with a huge bundle wobbling on her head with every shake of her little fist, you've never really lived.

She eventually surrendered the paper, which I unfolded to find just as blank as when I gave it to her. Dis papah no good! No good! It turned out, after a good bit of translation, that she thought she was asking me for a signed permission slip to leave and come back. She had presented the blank scrap to the gurkha, intently demanding to be let in as a result, which caused the normally serious guy to laugh nearly as hard as I was right at that moment. Regardless of the fact that she can neither read nor write, I would have expected the utter blankness of the paper to clue her in to the fact that it wasn't going to give her permission for much.

I think I expect too much.

Or, as it turns out, maybe I don't expect enough.

We stood together at handover, and Natalie (the current Team Leader who's been training me to step into her shoes next year) brought us a challenge. What if these wounds haven't healed because we haven't asked? What if God is waiting for us to speak out our requests, to rest in expectation on His power?

And so we did a different kind of rounds today at two o'clock. Instead of discussing drainage and fevers and what the inside of mouths looked like, we gathered at each bedside and prayed our way around D Ward.

I've been present for a lot of handovers here on the ship; I don't know if I've never been at one this powerful.

I don't know what it was, but taking that time to lay hands on these precious people and pray in faith for their healing, one at a time, leaving no one out, filled me with a sense of awe I don't normally have amidst the busyness of my shifts here.

One by one the patients bowed their heads. Some held out their hands to receive blessing, some snuggled further into the arms of the nurse holding them, some wrapped their arms around our waists as we stood at their bedsides and we prayed. We prayed for our sisters and brothers and grandmas and the pikins whose presence in our lives has become the standard by which we mark our days.

Tomorrow most of them will go in the wee hours of the morning. Just a few will stay one more night and then we'll close down for the year and somehow we'll go back to sleeping at night without lying awake wondering how they're doing downstairs.

These ones will go buoyed by prayer, surrounded by the angels we called down for them, filled with the comfort of the Spirit.

We should round like this more often.

There's a single tone that comes over the ship's intercom that marks the beginning of a ship-wide announcement. Usually you hear it when we're taking on fuel, or when the garbage container is full or things like that.

When it sounds at eleven on a Saturday night, you immediately assume the worst. Last night, that's exactly what it was. Emergency Medical Team to the ICU. Emergency Medical Team to the ICU.

We arrived quickly (not hard to do when you're living directly above the ICU itself) and everyone fell into place around the bed as we sought to save the life of the man lying there. I won't go into much detail, as I honestly don't know him, apart from everything that happened last night. Suffice it to say that he has an infection in his brain, and after a late-night trip to the OR, things don't look good.

He's being cared for now in the ICU, his family is on the way, and we're all praying for a miracle.

It's strange, this life. There's a critically ill man just below where I'm sitting, and I'm finding it hard to really care. I know that sounds awful, so please let me explain. For some reason this all feels so different from other times. Maybe because the first time I ever saw him he was unconscious and we were breathing for him, but I don't feel the same way I normally do when someone is so sick. There's no background, no common experience apart from that one, long, frantic hour before we turned him over to the OR staff. He's not a baby that I've held in my arms; I don't even know if he has family apart from the brother we were able to get in touch with this morning.

And despite all this, he is just as important as any of them. I am called to love this stranger in the same way I loved Baby Greg or O'Brien or Anicette, but I don't know how. I stood by his bed this morning, my hand on his arm, and I prayed for him. And I still don't feel anything.

Call it compassion fatigue, call it what you want, but you can't always care enough. Or at least you don't always, even if you should. It's one of the hardest things about this life, a life where you come face to face with pains and death on a consistent basis. Sometimes you just step back, throw up whatever shield you can and go on living despite the fact that there's a man fighting for his own life not fifty steps away. And you feel guilty for doing it, but there's no other way.

This is hard, not because I know him, but because I don't.


Please pray for James and his family. I'll update as I know anything more.

Six hundred.

I just e-mailed the last two names out. All six hundred sheets have a little black dot in the corner. People around the world are praying, and this feels so right.

Thank you, all of you. Thank you for responding, for caring about people you'll never meet and for tangling your lives up in the fabric of this place.

I'm heading down to the OR office right now to give back all the pink sheets.

We don't need them anymore.

Five hundred and forty-one.

Now that the pile has gotten this small, I can easily count through the names remaining. What seemed like an insurmountable task at the beginning has dwindled to a list of fifty-nine people.

The end of this outreach is turning into such a bittersweet time for me. Usually, my head is caught up in the successes right about now. I find myself running back over stories in my mind, remembering what we accomplished over the past months. This time, it's so different. This time, there is so much sadness mixed in with the joy.

Yesterday, I sat in the International Lounge along with all our Day Volunteers, the Togolese people who came onto the ship to serve their brothers and sisters alongside us this year. Together we watched a video slide show of photos from the outreach, and when the before and after photos of several patients came across the screen, the place erupted into cheers the like of which I haven't heard since the World Cup ended. We sang and danced and rejoiced together, and all I could think about was how many e-mails would be waiting for me when I got back to my room, how many more names I would be able to send out.

It's not just them. It's O'Brien and Anicette and Tim's dad and Mawuli, a dearly-loved patient whose funeral I attended last night.

I sat in a small Catholic church somewhere in Lome, the words of the Mass washing over me like rain, and I didn't realize I was crying myself until I felt the back of my hands grow wet. I stood and knelt and prayed and a wave of sadness threatened to overwhelm me.

Until I looked up to see the priest, eyes to heaven, holding up the cup, blessing the wine. A line of people moved slowly up to the front of the church, past the wooden pew where I knelt, to take Communion, and then everything was right again.

Because if all this rests on my shoulders, then I should let the sadness engulf me; there would be no way for me to stand up against this fight. And then I remember that it's not mine to win, that I could spend my life campaigning against the injustice in this world and never come close to the victory that was won on a hill outside Jerusalem almost two thousand years ago.

And for me, that puts everything back into perspective. Instead of a failure, this pile of pink sheets has become what I'm honestly seeing it as; a chance for all of us to take one more faltering step closer to God. Instead of looking at them and seeing what we couldn't do, I'm looking past them, at all of you, and seeing what we are doing. We are storming the gates of heaven on behalf of the poor, speaking the names of the forgotten ones in love.

And if our prayers are truly incense, like it says in Psalm 141, then heaven is fragrant tonight.

It's just after midnight on the sixth of August, and I've just typed out five more names to add to what one prayer warrior, Heather, has called a "concert of prayer." Those five have pushed us over the halfway mark.

304. More than half of the sheets now have a little black dot in the upper right hand corner, the signal to myself that all is well, that this one has been taken care of, taken in, taken to heart by one of you.

Please, don't stop. I'm going to admit that I'm tired. It's emotionally exhausting to sit in front of my computers for hours and hours, reading through all these sheets, seeing entire life stories spelled out in just a few words and knowing all too well what lies ahead for some of them. My neck is aching from staring back and forth between the screen and the piles of papers, but I wouldn't trade this for the world.

Because I get to pray, too. Each one of these that I type out and send to you is another one that is more than just a name on a sheet of paper to me. I look at the boxes holding the different piles for the different types of surgeries, and I can go to sleep knowing that I've read more than half of the stories in them. I feel like I'm connecting with my own work in a way I never have before, and I wish I could find words to explain how right it feels.

So don't stop e-mailing me and commenting. Tell your friends. Post on Facebook and Twitter and whatever other newfangled technology I've missed in the last couple of years. Because there are still 296 pink sheets, two hundred and ninety-six of God's children who need to be lifted up to His throne again.

And while we're on the subject of prayer, can I add one more name to all of your lists?

Tim is one of my best friends on the ship, part of a group that's become family to me over the past few years. Just recently, we got to meet his parents and brother and sister when they came to visit the ship. Yesterday, Tim's dad passed away at a hospital in Iceland, where he and Tim's mum were on vacation. It was sudden, and there was no way for Tim to be there in time, so instead he's trying to figure out how to get back to Australia to be with his sister, who also wasn't able to be there.

Please pray for Tim and for his family. They're scattered across the world and their lives have just been shattered. While you're praying for the patients on your pink sheets, please pray for Tim, too.

Update #3 (5 August, 10:30 Africa time) : 239 of the patients are being prayed for. That is almost half, in less than 2 days. Keep it up. Spread the word. Pray.

Update #2 (4 August, 19:30 Africa time) : 164 names have been spoken for. God is stirring up hearts, and I am so humbled to be a part of His process in all of this.

Update #1 (4 August, 12:30 Africa time) : 102 of the names on the pink sheets have been e-mailed out across the world, and people are starting to pray.



We laid them out on empty stretchers in the recovery room. Six hundred pink sheets, filled with information we had gathered at screenings throughout the outreach. From all over Togo they came to us, and we sat with them, learned their names, recorded their pain, filed their stories in a desk drawer and asked them to wait for their healing.

Six hundred pink sheets.

They were the ones we turned away. The ones who were too sick or not sick enough. The ones who missed their surgery dates and couldn't be rescheduled because there were hundreds more to take their places. The ones we tried to call but couldn't reach.

Six hundred of them, and when I looked at all the pages strewn across the room I wanted to scream.

Because they've always been there. They're in every country we visit, but we've never seen them before, never made it to their villages to peer into the darkness of their little mud huts and bring them into the light. And this time we did, this time we drove to meet them and we said we'd call if we could help and then we never did.

Instead we laid them all out in an empty room and we did the only thing left to us. We prayed. We didn't finish today; there were too many, so we're going to do it again tomorrow. We prayed over each one of them. Over Yema, the little boy who just turned one in July, too small for his cleft lip to be fixed but probably not getting enough to eat at home because of it. Over Maka, eight years old with a left arm that can't straighten and fingers crippled from the burns he suffered when he was two. Over Abel, a young man with a hernia the size of a football who we tried to call and who never picked up his phone and so his paper was moved to the back of the pile again.

Over Yema and Maka and Abel and hundreds more, lives reduced to words on a sheet of pink papers. A pile of cleft lips. Important, more often than not checked on the bottom of the forms, no, no, no scrawled across the tops when we realized that time had run out. A handful of tumors, all marked positive for HIV and turned away because in the time it would have taken for them to get their CD4 counts done, we would have found five more to replace each one of them.

I cried this afternoon. Frustrated, angry tears, and I don't think I've ever been so aware of the scope of the need here in West Africa. By the end of an outreach, we usually have a few pink sheets left in the drawer in the OR office, lumps and bumps that didn't quite make it into the surgery schedule but weren't going to mean the difference between life and death. This time we found the forgotten, called out to the ones who've never heard the voice of hope and then we turned away because the time was too short and there were too many of them.

Six hundred pink sheets. Hundreds and thousands more sleeping on dirt floors tonight, nursing their pain and their fears as we get ready to sail away.

Pray with us. Please pray with us.

If you'd like to pray specifically for a patient, let me know in a comment or an e-mail, and I'll head down to the office and choose one or five or twenty names for you. If it's children who touch your heart, I'll find you a child to pray for. If you're drawn to those who have suffered burns, there's a whole pile of them. There are mamas and papas, old men and little girls, and they have all been told no.

Wouldn't it be incredible if we could find six hundred people willing to pray for these six hundred?

Please pray with us.

I feel so silly today, like a little kid who threw a tantrum because she didn't get her own way, when really her papa was planning on giving her a second scoop of ice cream all along.

I got the call late last night, while I was lying awake in bed and worrying about Maurius. Just so you're aware, he's had another episode, and they're taking him back to the OR to put in a trach. For Maurius, an episode is nothing to be scoffed at, nothing like on TV, where everything is neatly packaged by the end of the show. In this case, nothing has been that simple. He'd somehow managed to block off his breathing tube for the second time in less than eight hours, and the doctors were simply unable to get another tube in its place. There were no other options.

Sleep was a long time coming last night as I sat on my couch and prayed even as I raged at God, unable even in my anger to stop asking Him for hope. Why can O'Brien have a miracle while Maurius suffers through yet another traumatic procedure? Why one and not the other? And yet I couldn't stop myself asking Him for wisdom, for skill, for sure-handed surgeons. Questioning His will and asking Him to provide all in one long, jumbled-up prayer that I'm sure the Spirit had to interpret for me because I know I wasn't making any sense.

So many of you have written and reminded me that it's okay to question, that it's okay to be angry, and I'm so grateful for that reassurance. Your words mixed with His in the dark of the night, and I found that I was able to trust even through my hurt. Remembering that the promised light is only for the next step. That even though right now all I can see is the snake across my path, the step after that, when the Light moves forward with me, might be something so incredible that I'll wonder why I was ever scared to begin with.

And so of course, with the morning came the light. Mercy new with the dawn, and Maurius is surprising us all. I sat with him while his nurse took her lunch break and the ventilator continued its relentless pulse. His bottom lip stuck out in a constant pout, and he kept trying to pull on the tubing connected to his new trach. The solution was obvious, although I'm not sure who ended up benefiting more from it when I stuck my finger in his chubby little hand and he held on with all his strength. His forehead smoothed out and his heart rate inched down a couple points and I sat there, the pain in my heart easing just a tiny bit, hardly daring to breathe while I watched him do so effortlessly. Such a change from yesterday, and his soft fingers clenched around mine let me hope in a way I hadn't dared before.

It appears Maurius has decided to stay with us, because when I checked on him again before leaving for the day, the ventilator sat in the corner, unplugged and silent. Maurius was wide awake, glaring at us with his furrowed brow, needing just a little oxygen blowing into his trach to help him breathe. He's apparently not a huge fan of all the fuss, and would most likely prefer to be in his mama's arms, chugging a bottle.

All that will come with time. Maurius is at the start of a long road, but the Light that's shown us the path this far will lead us home, I'm sure. And somewhere, in the background, I can almost hear God laughing at me. Not mocking or derisive, that laughter; just the amused chuckle of One who could see from the beginning that there was really nothing for me to get mad about in the first place. The One who knew I was going to get that second scoop of ice cream, and forty seven more, if only my bowl were big enough to hold it all at once.

I'd like a bigger bowl, please.

Yesterday, when I was writing to you about my adventures in Ghana, all I was thinking about was the little baby down in the ICU.

My office day had suddenly turned clinical when Jenn paged me. Can you help us with the baby, she asked, breathless, and then hung up. There was no question which baby she meant; Obre (or O'Brian; we're not entirely sure which name is his, since his mama uses them interchangeably) is the continuation of last week's sadness. At four months, Obre tips the scales at a hair over six and a half pounds, small even for a newborn. He has a bilateral cleft lip and palate, and was very, very sick.

Three seconds later, when I was at his bedside in B Ward, Jenn met my eyes and my heart sank as I realized that we were losing, that it all felt far too much like Baby Greg. We knelt together with Obre's nurse, holding the mask to his face as he struggled to breathe, and we knew that it wasn't looking good.

This time, though, we had something we didn't have back when Baby Greg was with us; a ventilator that can give support through a mask, the less invasive step before a breathing tube. With this huge tool in our arsenal, the decision was quickly made to transfer Obre to the ICU and let the ventilator help him breathe.

It took a long time to get him settled, and all the while I felt a sickening sense of déjà vu, watching his pitiful struggles mirroring Baby Greg's, so long ago. All that kept running through my mind was, But we lost Baby Greg. And we lost Ani. And we can't lose any more. It took forever, but Obre was finally settled and I headed to bed, fully expecting to come to work in the morning and find that he had deteriorated overnight to the point of needing the breathing tube.

Instead, the ship is buzzing with news of the miracle.

Around midnight, Obre started to spiral downwards, his heart racing and his oxygen saturations falling. His nurse, Natalie, tried every trick in the book, but soon realized that nothing was helping. She called anesthesia who called Dr. Gary and they gathered around the baby in the dark of the night. They quickly decided to intubate, since there was no way Obre would survive otherwise. Natalie and another ICU nurse, Jenny, moved to collect supplies and draw up medications, preparing for the procedure. As they worked, they looked over to see Dr. Gary, his head bowed, hands on the baby, praying to Jehovah Rophi. It was 12:20.

At 12:25, Obre's oxygen saturations increased from sixty to a hundred percent. His racing heart slowed to normal, and the bewildered nurses put down the tools they had collected. The surgeon and anesthetist slipped away, and Obre was left, requiring just a little oxygen blowing hear his face to keep him stable. No mask. No tube. No ventilator. Absolutely no medical explanation.

There was a miracle last night. My heart has been full to bursting all day long knowing that God is so absolutely here. That He cares for each little sparrow baby, knowing that this one was falling and intervening in a way that leaves no room for doubt.

As I type, our sparrow baby is either tucked into a nest of pillows and blankets or snuggled into his mama's arms, where he's been all day, breathing easily.

We had a miracle last night. Do you know how exciting it is to be able to say that?

This is how I remember Anicette. She spent most of the year with us in Benin, bouncing around between the ward and the hospitality centre, trying to find the magic formula that would let her gain enough weight for surgery. It worked. By the time she finally went to the operating room to fix her cleft lip, Anicette was a plump little baby, well-loved by her mama and every single nurse who laid eyes on her.

I was sitting in the office yesterday afternoon when our phlebotomist, Maggie, came looking for me. Can you help me draw blood on a tiny baby? I followed her willingly, always happy to do some clinical work in the middle of an admin day. When I opened the door, I saw one of our translators leaning over a crying baby wrapped in a piece of cloth. Only it wasn't a baby. It was a little girl, just a few months younger than my niece.

Anicette.

At fourteen months old, Ani is so underweight that she doesn't even register on the growth charts. Her skin is hanging off her bones, her cheeks just a shadow of their former plumpness. We don't know why. We can't figure out if it's because she hasn't been fed or if she's just not tolerating the food she's getting. We don't know what it is, but it's obvious that something is badly, badly wrong.

So we prayed and bundled her tight and I stuck a needle into a spidery little vein in her head, the only place I could find on her tiny, dehydrated body to get blood. She cried the entire time, weak little sobs that broke my heart. When it was all over, I picked her up, held her close and told her I was sorry.

I walked her back to her mama, unable to stop the tears from spilling down my cheeks. Because it shouldn't be like this. No child should be starving to death. No one should have to travel to another country just to find someone to help.

Please pray for baby Ani. She's here now, tucked into the corner of A Ward, the best place for her to be. But it breaks my heart to see her like this, to know that it might happen all over again when we leave.

Please pray.

Every once in a while I stop talking about my little brown babies and ask you to pray for a white one instead. Today is one of those days.

Meet Lily Anna. She was just born this morning, weighing in at a not-so-hefty two pounds two ounces, the beautiful daughter of my friends from the ship here, Lorah and Justin. Lily has a long road ahead of her, and I know Lorah and Justin would be more than appreciative of prayers for their little family. I don't have all the details, just what I can glean from Facebook updates and photos from across the ocean, but it looks like she's off to a good start, especially blessed with the parents she has.

Let's pray for this little one, okay?

I come with more sobering news than I've been bringing the last few days. Because just when it seemed that everything was going our way, that wounds were going to be well on their way to healing, today was a sucker punch. One after another, we discovered new evidence of breakdown, new reasons to doubt.

But the truth remains: our God is a God of Healing. He can, and I pray that He will heal these wounds. I think when He says we just need a tiny seed's worth of faith, that what He's saying is that all we need to do is ask. The more I think about that, the more comforting it is. Because it takes all the weight out of my tiny hands and puts it back squarely into the ones that can hold it. The only thing expected of me is simply to come, to ask. The rest He will do. So here is what I ask, and what I want you to ask with me.

Ask for Christine. Her wound has torn back open, and she needs to be under the care of a competent general surgeon as soon as possible. All of the local hospitals are currently on strike, and we don't know what to do. God does.

Ask for Kossiwa and her mama. Kossiwa had her cleft lip repaired almost a week ago, and when we removed the packing holding her nose into the right shape, we found that from the top of her lip all the way through the floor of her nose, all she has is an open hole. Her mama is devastated, and Kossiwa will need more surgery in the future. For now, they have to go home with a baby still broken.

Ask for Therese. She is recovering from VVF surgery, a wound infection and a skin graft. She's doing well, but after what happened with Christine, we're wary, not willing to get excited too soon in case infections rears its ugly head again.

Ask for Beatrice. She also had VVF surgery, and her wound has required the most specialized care we have available. When the ship leaves, so will our technology. She will be going to stay at a local clinic where her wound will be cared for, but we don't know what will happen with it once we leave.

Ask for Josua. He's also battling a stubborn wound, his left over after a hernia operation. He'll be roommates with Beatrice and Therese at the clinic, and we're praying that his infection clears up so that his skin can heal.

Ask for Wasti and his mama. She's still learning to feed him, and the envelope on my desk marked Cow Collection is starting to fill. Their future looks bright, full of the promise of home.

Ask for all these and all the others, almost seven thousand, who came up the gangway this year for surgery. Ask that the Light would shine in their darkness, that Truth would win over lies and that Hope would take the place of despair.

Ask all this.

I should be asleep right now, not writing. I have to get up in a few hours, and the baby I'm going to be caring for is so sick. So very sick.

Oh Hubie.

I don't know if it'll ever get easier. Sitting with a family, explaining that the hope I told them to cling to is fading fast. Watching that single, silent tear track down a mama's cheek to hit the floor with a tiny splash. Pulling back blankets to let a papa touch his baby's foot before he rushes out into the evening, unwilling to sit vigil with his wife, his hard eyes suspiciously red.

It's so hard to pray for God's will to be done when I'm getting more and more convinced that His will isn't what I want.

So when I say Pray for Hubert, I mean so much more than that. I mean pray for his mama, because now, maybe so close to the end, she finally cares, and if he does go back to Jesus, it's going to hurt her. I mean pray for the doctors. We don't have a PICU doctor on the ship, so we've been pulling from the jumbled expertise of everyone around, doing the best we can. I mean pray for the nurses. We've been letting Hubie get a firm hold on our hearts for the past month, and now he's so sick, and we don't know what to do. It's so hard to look at a baby who was getting better, getting fat and happy, and see him pinned to the bed by tubes and wires, his little body shaking with each breath of the ventilator.

I keep praying for God to fill me back up, with love and strength and wisdom, so that I can go back into that room tomorrow and pour myself out again.

I'm starting to think I might be a little too broken to hold all that right now.

Today was horrible in so many ways. I'm drained, body and soul, and I just want to curl up under my covers and forget it ever happened.

Hubert took a turn for the worse this morning. He's now on a ventilator and still struggling to maintain the oxygenation in his blood. The pneumonia in his lungs is much worse, and we're not so sure there's a light at the end of the tunnel anymore.

Please keep praying. I know that's all I've been saying the last few days; pray, pray pray. But we're doing everything we can from the medical side of things, and so there's nothing else to be done.

There was so much more that happened, with another little baby who went back to Jesus, but I just can't talk about it right now because the weight of her body in my arms is still to fresh. I can still smell her on my skin and it's not fair that she was so small and so sick and that she never had a chance.

I'm going to go eat dinner and then I'll go check on Hubert and we'll all keep praying, right?

Tonight at community meeting, we sang a song that nearly had me in tears.

You're the God of this City
You're the King of these people
You're the Lord of this nation
You are

You're the Light in this darkness
You're the Hope to the hopeless
You're the Peace to the restless
You are

There is no one like our God
There is no one like our God

It was when we got to the next part that my heart climbed up into my throat and my eyes misted over.

For greater things have yet to come
And greater things are still to be done in this City
Greater thing have yet to come
And greater things are still to be done in this City

Because there's a little baby lying in the ICU tonight who needs something great to happen in his life. He's not as sick as some we've had in there; he's still breathing on his own, but it's hard work for him and none of us is sure that we can see the light at the end of his tunnel quite yet. His name is Hubert. When his mama is feeling especially loving, she calls him Hubie, but that doesn't happen terribly often.

You see, little Hubie was born with a cleft lip and palate; he's had the surgery to repair his lip, but the roof of his mouth is still a gaping hole. When he was admitted, Hubie weighed less than eight pounds. He's nine months old.

Hubert's mama and four-year old sister sport matching scars on their cheeks, markings inflicted in infancy as part of the Voodoo religion. Hubert's cheeks are smooth and unblemished. When pressed, his mama revealed that she and her husband haven't had his face cut yet because they're not sure they want to claim him. And he lies in the bed, gasping and coughing as his mama sits by his side, her face an inscrutable mask.

I can't fathom it. I can't wrap my head around a system that tells you that your baby is cursed because of a birth defect. I can't come to terms with the fact that his mama cared so little about his life that he was probably just weeks away from starving to death when he came back to us. I just can't understand how you could look into the eyes of your tiny child and actually wrestle with whether or not you were going to take ownership over his life.

And now Hubie's sick. He's picked up a pneumonia, probably a virus that was going around the wards that attacked his already weak body, and he's covered in rashes, burning with fevers and gasping for breath.

But I firmly believe that greater things are still to be done here. We sang that song and I spoke the name of Jesus, because I know that in His name, there is no darkness that has power here, no evil that can cover Hubie's life.

Pray with us, will you? Pray that the darkness would be overcome, that Hubert's life would be saved and that he would be a testament to God's grace for his parents.

Pray for Hubert.