Two good surprises.

Haiti is a place where you get surprised every day. Usually those surprises suck. Ie- "Surprise, you have no water!" or "Surprise, no power today!" or "Surprise, your kids teachers are tired so there's no school today!" or "Surprise, your horn's been replaced with a Haitian horn that has different super-embarrassing"ringtones!" or "Surprise, IBESR is here with 7 employees for a four hour inspection!" or "Surprise, you just paid $579 for your new air conditioner and the hope of a more comfortable life this summer but guess what? Your power won't let it stay on for more than 10 minutes at a time." Surprise!

It's not that the surprises are NEVER good. Sometimes the surprises are good... but usually they are just something that cost money or cause inconvenience. (Or more likely, both.)

Today, however, I had not one but TWO good surprises. (Which two good surprises is almost like a third surprise, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.)

First surprise- Josiah is great. He's (for all intents and purposes) better. It was like a switch flipped earlier in the day and he's fine now. Phew. That boy knows how to scare me. He's still looking skinny and kind of sickly, but a few days around my staff catering to his every whim will fatten him up and brat him back up. :) A big giant thank you to the people who were praying for him (and us.) I am so relieved and feel like I can breathe a bit easier.

Well, the first surprise LEAD to the second surprise. Last night I pretty much had it in my mind we would be headed to Port Au Prince with Josiah to take him to a different hospital. When he was just better this morning, it meant that we no longer had to go to Port and it also meant that I was free to take my day off. During the last 6 months or so, days off have become pretty sacred around here but (obviously) when you have a sick kid, all bets are off. So surprise #2 was that I have the day off. There's a big temptation when there have been weeks like this to just fight through and skip the day off because you're already so behind from the work that DIDN'T get done when Josiah was in the hospital. It was after I decided I was taking the day off that I was reading this post of Tara's blog. (Tara Livesay is one of my very favorite people in the whole world.) My favorite part of the blog was her quoting Beth McHoul who said to her once, "unhealthy people make the best missionaries." It's SO true. I have fallen into this trap over and over. I have seen others fall into it and take their family and ministry down. I never realized how important it was until our lives fell apart from the lack of it.

So all that is to say, I just slapped my bathing suit on and am headed out to the beach with the single ladies. And no, I am not going because they are single. It just happens that the all of these particular girls that I am headed out with are single. Which means, yes, I will ABSOLUTELY be blaring Beyonce on the way there.