And for each birth, the baby's cross was in the hospital room when he or she entered the world.
They were among the keepsakes we took with us when we moved to Haiti and the four crosses were scattered around our house there.
One day we came home to find Caleb's cross in several pieces. Nobody had been in the house except the dear Haitian lady who cleaned for us weekly. When we asked her what had happened to the cross, she said flatly, "It broke."
There was no apology and no sign of taking responsibility, just "it broke".
Of course she had no idea how precious and sentimental it was to us, but still I was surprised to not hear at least "I am sorry for breaking that."
I was told by others with deeper roots in Haiti that it was a cultural thing. They said it is rare in Haitian culture to get an apology in such a situation since an apology indicates responsibility.
And responsibility means you are on the hook for paying for it.
And when meager resources mean you struggle to meet your family's day to day needs, you are on your guard against any unexpected costs.
I came to the conclusion, then, that the lack of apology wasn't really "a Haitian thing", it was a "survival in the midst of scarcity thing".
On a much bigger spiritual scale, before the holy God of the universe, each one of us needs to come to grips with the tremendous debt incurred by his or her own sinfulness.
In a sense, true repentance puts us on the hook for that debt. And we do it even knowing that we don't have a spare penny to even begin to pay off that debt.
But the glorious thing is that then we look up, and we see Jesus on the cross in our place.
"But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all." - Isaiah 53:5-6
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