We'll take any hope we can get from Haiti. More came today.
When it seemed that no one else could still be alive in all those collapsed buildings, a boy thought he heard a voice from the rubble of a bank building. The husband of a woman who worked there had been frantically trying to find his wife. When the boy told that man about what he had heard, the husband went for a nearby rescue team from California.
They found her - singing. Over a week after a quake leveled much of Port-au-Prince, a woman was still alive. When she wasn't singing, they said she was praying, "Jesus, help me! Jesus, help me!" And when they brought out this miracle lady, she just kept on singing. Loudly, the rescuers said.
Again, that defiant, quakeproof faith was on display for all the world to see on television. A faith rooted in a Man named Jesus, who has sustained His children through life and through death across the centuries.
I know this Jesus, too. My prayer is that I, too, can hold Him so tightly in my personal quakes that I can also sing in the rubble. Because nothing validates the reality of a living Savior more than having His peace when your world's come down around you. All eyes are on you at times like that.
God's first century ambassadors, Paul and Silas, had been brutally beaten, unjustly imprisoned and locked up in stocks. But "about midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the other prisoners were listening to them" (Acts 16:25). That was right before a violent earthquake that helped liberate Paul and Silas and drove their jailer to ask them how to know the Jesus who gave them songs at midnight.
This is the peace Jesus promised to His friends the night He would be arrested; the night their world would collapse. He said, "Peace I leave with you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid" ... "I have told you these things so that in Me you might have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world" (John 14:27; 16:33).
If you have this Jesus, you can have this peace, even when there seems to be no reason. In the Bible's words, "The peace of God...transcends all understanding" (Philippians 4:7). One Haitian rescued from a collapsed school was asked what he was saying to himself in those long hours when he didn't know if he would live or die. He said, "As a Christian, I'm saying, 'Jesus, my life is in Your hands.'"
Our kids used to go to sleep singing a little chorus that says, "Safe am I, safe am I, in the hollow of His hands." Living or dying, working or out of work, healthy or deathly sick, loved or all alone, if you belong to Jesus, you really are safe.
Jesus, I have available to me the same peace, same joy that's sustaining those people in Haiti, in circumstances exponentially worse than any of my issues. Give me the grace to sing in the rubble.