prayer

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.