Peace Beyond Understanding

     Ever since I got back from Honduras, I have been ready to go again. In fact, I didn't feel ready to leave when we did. I think that God has more lessons for me there, and I want to learn them. However, through all my excitement about going back again, there has been something in the back of my mind that has kept me from being fully happy about going back, until now. Here's the story.
     One day when we were at the orphanage, the members of our team who were working in the nursery found that two of the babies were very sick. I don't know all the details because I wasn't in that room with them , but when we were leaving for the day we were told that we would be taking these babies to the hospital. As I watched two of our team members hold the babies as we headed to the hospital, I suddenly felt very young. I was no longer playing with children and making them smile, now I was involved in the uglier side of mission work, and I had a hard time processing that experience. I didn't feel old enough to deal with the harsh reality that these babies were very sick and would most likely not have gotten the care they needed if we had not been there. What got me through that day was the fact that I thought we had solved the problems. I thought God had brought us there to get the babies to the care they needed, and we had, so now they would get better.
     Flash forward to a few months later. I was in my dorm about to go to sleep and I decided to check Facebook first, just because. As I was groggily scrolling through, I noticed that one of my friends from the mission team had posted something that was getting lots of comments, so I paused to see what that was about. It was then that I found out that one of the babies we had taken to the hospital had died. I didn't know what to do. It didn't make sense to me. A baby that had never had the chance to really experience life had died despite the fact that we were there to take him to the hospital. I didn't know how to process that. I am old enough to know that life isn't fair, but this just seemed cruel.  That was the first and only time I ever doubted wanting to go back.
     Since then I have been working on dealing with that experience, because I know I need to go back and I don't want my feelings about it to prevent me from opening my heart to these children again. Today I was finally able to find closure and move forward toward's the next trip with 100 percent of my heart. My devotional this morning had a verse that showed me that trying to understand why this happened is not the way to deal with it. The peace of God which transcends all understanding will guard your hearts in Jesus Christ. (Phillipians 4:7). I am finally at peace about the death of that baby, because I have stopped trying to understand it. I have accepted the fact that there are some things I will never understand in this life, and that I should stop focusing so much energy on trying to. Instead, I am praying for peace and comfort that God provides that goes past my understanding. So, Honduras trip 2014, I'm ready for you now. Let's see what God will do this time.