“Civil War is Coming!”

Rather than take a red-eye flight out of LAX to Miami and an early morning flight the following morning to Port Au Prince, we decided to take a 2:30 p.m. flight from LAX to Miami, so that we could arrive in Miami early enough to get a good night's sleep before taking a mid-morning flight to Port Au Prince. But then a thunderstorm rolled into Miami as we were in the air, and the Miami airport was shut three separate times for over five hours in total. As a result, we ended up arriving in Miami around 1 a.m. and had to take a taxi to our hotel, for the hotel already had cut off its free shuttle service (memo to file: never again book a hotel that is more than a mile from the airport, even if you are saving $5). Our cabbie was Haitian and looked a tad bit angry for having to stay up so late, so I started to engage him in conversation in hopes of brightening his evening. Before long, however, he was angrily telling me that "civil war is coming to Haiti, and it could break out at anytime." "Great," I thought, "just as long as it doesn't break out in the next eight days." To be candid, I started to wonder what in the world I had gotten us into, but we had no intention of backtracking, for we truly sensed that God had called us to go on this trip to Haiti.