In His Image

  My father and I preached for a total of 8 times, and each sermon was supposed to be about 2 hours long.  We were supposed to start at eight in the morning, and there was usually about half the crowd of 100 adults in place by then.  Some wouldn’t arrive until half an hour later, and I wondered at that until I found out that most did not have any way to keep time, and with a walk of up to two hours, it gave a clearer understanding of their dedication and desire to be there.  Three men, one older than my father, walked that terrible trail to Angolmont twice in the pitch dark, with no light, because they wanted to be there in the worst way.  Many of them would come in and kneel down in front of their chair and spend up to 20 minutes in prayer before rising and brushing the sticky white dust from their knees, and taking their seat.  The Trail to the Angolmont Church They sang with their heart!  Most would close their eyes and sing to the Lord and the buil...

School's main assembly When we arrived Thursday afternoon, the school was still in session so we walked over to see 170 students packed into, and around that one church building. The children were sitting mostly on chairs and benches, but not like you and I would sit on them. They were packed in so tight, that you couldn’t hardly have forced a ruler down between most of them. Two chairs would be set side by side and one person sat on the gap between the two to get more seating. Or sometimes they put a slightly flattened piece of log between two chairs to gain even more space even as it comes at the expense of comfort. There were no desks or places to put their notepads on to write, just their laps, but they had to watch their elbows as everyone had to jostle to find room. And yet they were happy to be learning, and sang mightily with bright, shining eyes!  School is a little different there. They will start at about eight in the morning, and go until about one in the afternoo...

 How can I explain what this last weekend has meant to me to those who have never been in such a place?  To try and put it into words, just seems to cheapen it somewhat, and yet the Lord impressed it upon my heart is such a way that I cannot bear to keep silent! Five years ago, they people of the Pincroix (pronounced “pin-QUA”) did not know about Jesus.   They were bound up in either Catholicism, voodoo, or most likely a serious mixing of the two.   They would still be there today, if it wasn’t for a man who kept having a dream/vision of preaching to these people repeatedly over several months.   But there was a problem.   This man had a young bride, and a job that paid $80 per day which is unheard of wages in Haiti!   Why should he walk 8 hours across the mountains to an area that he had never been, to a place that you could hardly drive to, where the witch doctor was the most powerful person, to preach the gospel to those who might never respond? ...

It was Valentine’s Day, 2001, that I sat across from my wife, Aimee and thought about how life had changed so much in the last year, and how it was about to change again.   Less than four months before, we had been married and while life as newlyweds was wonderful, there was a tinge of apprehension as she battled some of the residual effects of having had ovarian cancer just a year prior.   Exhaustion and fatigue were the rule of the day, and we wondered if there was something wrong besides the fact that we were excited to be expecting our first child.   Our doctor had requested that we have an ultrasound to see if her remaining ovary was okay, or if there was a problem that could be indicating that the cancer had returned.   There was also that worrisome tiny lump on her neck that they couldn’t figure out what it was.   So just that morning, we had gone in for the ultrasound and were able to see our child for the first time, and also have a biopsy done on t...