Today was a good day! The weather in Hait has been fantastic. We worked outside all morning in the hot Haitian sun. It was in the mid to upper 80s today and yet there is absolutely no humidity as evidenced that I drank 3 liters of water and didn’t sweat one drop. I am NOT used to that!
We left the guesthouse this morning around 9 AM and drove for 40 minutes over to a place called Canaan. Two years ago Canaan was just a pocked mark piece of God-forsaken hardscrabble hillside at the foothills of the majestic mountains that seem to hover over the three sides surrounding Port-Au-Prince. Canaan is about an hour outside of the capital city. After the earthquake the government created a tent city in this barren dusty hillside of crumbled limestone and scrub brush. People living in PAP were told they would be given jobs if they relocated their life outside of the city to start a new life in Canaan. None of it came true. No job materialized, no ‘new life’, just wind, dust, boredom, and a landscape peppered with tattered tents with no electricity or running water. Each ‘house’ looks like a rickety 10×10 shacks of tarp and clanky wind-blown tin. Today over 5000 families live a hard life on this crumbling piece of Haiti. Most of the homes are the size and texture of tool sheds–my back yard storage barn where I keep my push mower is larger than some of these homes.
Through a series of ‘unexplainable’ events Jeff and Deb met Pastor Nathan. Pastor Nathan pastors a church in Delma near PAP. After the earthquake many of his flock were relocated to Canaan. So he went to Canaan and started a church in the middle of the community. Today that church has over 400 people connecting, engaging, and buzzing in the life of Jesus lived out. Each day of the week the wind will blow the sound of ruckus songs of praise flowing wafting from the slats in the windows of the church. Turns out the God forsaken places are not that at all! Last Summer Jeff and a crew of workers from the states put the finishing touches on a 30×70 ft church building. It’s simple, nothing fancy, but probably the most beautiful church building I’ve ever seen not because of color or design….but because of function and place. This church is literally an oasis in the desert-as all churches should be. A place where thirsty souls come out of the heat and ramshackle existence to be refreshed and renewed by the living water of God-His Spirit. A place where love is planted and rooted deep in the lives of the family of God bearing much fruit in a barren land of the living.
Part of our job this morning was to paint and polyurethane the inside of the building. During the week the building is a school for 130 kids from Canaan. Across the rocky dusty yard is an outbuilding that serves as a medical clinic and several from our team offered medical care to 20 people today. One of the girls who showed up came with her older sister. She is three, her name is MeMe. Meme’s mom is sick and pretty much out of the picture. Meme needed her temperature taken but sometime a little girl needs a mommy’s touch more than she needs pills for pain. Over the course of the morning the women in our group passed Meme around as she laid her droopy head on the familiar nurturing shoulders of strangers from America–both hoping for that moment in time to freeze longer than time allowed.
So…among other things…that is what we did. We also put siding on an outdoor kitchen that is being built to feed the community. Right now, people are walking an hour + one way to buy food in a nearby town. Not acceptable!
So that’s what we did. Here is what we learned. The essence of life. The things we clamber for: Joy, well-being, love, contentment, peace, security, happiness, acceptance, community, rested soul, and did I mention JOY? These things we spend billions to buy and, yet, illusively cannot seem to keep. These things of life that make the difference between living and surviving…they are alive here in spades. The stuff of living life well, of being most alive, of all that is most beautiful about life itself…it lives in tool shed shacks with packed dusty dirt floors. It cooks its food over charcoal pits and hikes across town to the nearest watering hole. It follows children as they run and chase and screech turning piles of rocks into sandboxes of play. It gathers in nightly with neighbors in circles around make shift porches to laugh and tell stories. It breaks out across the beaming face of the passerby on the street, um, well more like craggy dirt path.
Back home in our walled compound of cement, razor wire, and metal gates…All of us tonight sat around debriefing our day–amazed. We were amazed because the secrets out! The emperor’s naked. You don’t need life to go well to live well and be fully alive. These people taught the know-it-all Americans how to live today. They exposed our greatest lies and unrelenting quest. More is here and it’s alive and well in hardscrabble Haiti…
Good night friends! May the God of peace be with you. I leave you with this as it’s truth echoed off the limestone walls of the mountainside today!!
6 I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, 17 so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, 18 may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, 19 and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. - Ephesians 3
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Blessings for the journey. Powerful posts. Grace to all of you for this day. Ken
Wow! What a beautiful and amazing story. Thank you so much for sharing your daily experiences with us while you’re on this trip, Jon
thanks for the reminders — every day i could read this and be reminded. Joy is a great reminder. Thanks to the whole group for what you are doing.
wow, a place where you don’t sweat… miracles… thanks, again,for taking us “along” with you on this trip… it’s been encouraging to hear about what’s happening and feel like we are a part of the experience… loved the rooftop picture at sunset - fantastic… church was good today… tom and vern did a great job… all of you were missed though…
be safe, serve well, and experience how wide and how deep God’s love is…