God Is On The Move
Hello again from beautiful Haiti.
I will apologize right off for the lack of photo sharing on here. I know it’s nice to see a visual of what is going on but much of the mission work we are doing here is very intimate and pictures are not an option in most situations.
As Linda Lee mentioned in the last post, we went to the hospital in Petit-Goave last Thursday and prayed and sang over the patients and their families. I wanted to add a little more detail to our time there. We had originally planned on laying hands on people and praying for specific needs as requested by each family, but through past experiences with other teams, it was learned that the best way to do things was to pray for the whole room of people at once “Haitian Style”, which means we all pray our own prayer out loud together at the same time. It’s really quite beautiful.
We prayed over people of all ages. Newborn babies to those probably in their 90s.
Occasionally you could see a face light up with a smile and a glimmer of hope. Sometimes a patient would grab our hand and tell us thank you or God bless you, which was encouraging for us as well, because it was not a hope filled place by any means. It was hard to see that anything we were doing was making a difference, but each one of us had to believe that God met those people and comforted their hearts, spoke to them, healed them.....we had to believe He met them in that moment and that our prayers were not as futile as they seemed. I managed to hold it together while we were there, but once in the van on our way home, the tears flowed. They are still heavy on my heart. Truly, I have never experienced real suffering. A humbling experience to say the least. Please join us in praying for them.
We have been doing devotionals at the clinic here on campus every morning since Friday. They have been powerful. People listen eagerly and several come forward for prayer every time. We will continue to do them every morning until we leave.
Sunday night we had dinner at the Goat and Coke, a local restaurant in town. We drove to Marc and Lisa’s house then all walked together from there. Several of us (including myself) had goat and others (the less adventurous ones) chose chicken. All I can say is that when we get home I am tracking down a place that sells goat, because now that I’ve had it, I refuse to do life without it. So good!
Yesterday we started our day with devotionals at the clinic, then headed to the Children’s Village to paint another classroom (We had quite an audience! And that audience LOVED Jakob’s beard:). After that we hurried back for lunch and showers to get ready for our first day doing visitations in the village. We took a short drive to Petit Paradis (Little Paradise). We parked at an old broken down gas station then walked up the hillside to people’s houses to share our testimonies and offer prayer. The people here are so hungry for more of Jesus. They are so aware of the importance of prayer and encouragement through prayer to stay on the path that leads them away from temptation and closer to God. One of the people we visited was a man who used to be a Voodoo Priest but is now a born again Christian. His prayer was for God to reveal to him why he led the life he did, and why he did the things he did before he gave his life to Jesus. You could see the burden of shame he was still carrying. We prayed for him to know the grace of God on a deeper level. We prayed that he would find a clearer understanding of the redemption of Jesus, then we sang Amazing Grace over him. I don’t want to say too much on here because we are all eager to share our stories with you in person but, man, what a powerful experience.
We have another visitation planned for this afternoon and if we are feeling up to it we will go out for another on Wednesday afternoon as well.
God is on the move in this place and in our hearts. Much love family! See you all soon!