Whew! Well we made it through another long leg of our journey via bus, train, metro, plane, and limousine. Our flight from Barcelona had to make an unscheduled stop in Nova Scotia, Canada to refuel and empty the bathrooms. This stop caused us to miss our connecting flight to Miami. It ended up being a bit of a hassle to rebook our flight from Newark, New Jersey to Miami so that we would not miss our flight to Haiti early the next morning. We ended up being split into two groups and put on different flights. The group I wound up in was the group that flew into the closest airport to Miami that we could being West Palm Beach and compliments to the airline we were shuttled by limousine from West Palm Beach to Miami. It was quite the 3 day adventure! Once arriving into Port-au-Prince we worked and stayed with an organization called ACTS World Relief. They kept us very busy! Within the first couple days, we led 3 church services, 2 open air programs, and visited a local hospital that had been a major relief to the disaster that happened earlier this year. We did many different types of ministry—working in children’s homes with children who had HIV, AIDS, and scabies. We held a service and prayer walk at a refugee camp. We woke up many nights because we could hear people practicing voodoo nearby. We prayed against this fervently. One of the open air services was at a tent campus that had also been established for the disaster relief. We had close to 300 people watching. The response was incredible! As we neared the end of our drama, “Forgiveness,” the crowd was chanting to see the drama again. There is a part of the drama where Jesus is victorious in a fight against sin and what it does to His children. The crowd cheered, and God’s majesty was shining bright! Later that same week, we went to a seaside village where we led a church service. When we first walked into the church there was such a heavy spirit. The word that was on our hearts for them was that He wanted to turn their heavy hearts into hearts overflowing with joy. We started off with worship and puppets, and as we began to praise and declare truth, the atmosphere changed. It went from somber people with heavy hearts to people standing up, dancing, and singing! The pastor was so uplifted that he encouraged us by saying we were apostles and that this church would never be the same. Later in the week, he called ACTS World Relief to personally thank them for sending our team. ACTS World Relief later told us that was the first time they had ever had a pastor call to thank them. Isn’t God good! His favor is abundant! His joy is radiant! We all learned an important lesson that day because we woke up very early that morning to go on a bumpy ride to the church with 17 of us crammed into a little pickup truck for an hour. Many of us were very tired and tempted to coast through what seemed to be just another church service, but in unity, our team chose the moment and asked God to bring His Kingdom into that little church by the beach. Jesus tenderly met His beautiful Bride who turned from sorrow to joy that day! Also, during our stay in Haiti we traveled about 2 hours to a village in the mountains. We stayed at a school that was not in session at the time so we planned different activities for the children near by and prayed over many families and their homes much like we did in Uganda. We stayed at the school for a couple of days, our stay there was wonderful. We had the opportunity to pray with and encourage the man who is running the school. I learned that there are huge spiders in the mountains... I slept for about an hour the first night and the second night I was so tired that at about 2 am I figured out that I could use my earring to pin my bug-net to the sheet that was covering the table I was sleeping on. After I had looked over the job I had done thoroughly and made sure the earring were secure, I decided to use my blanket to lay around the corners to make sure there was NO SPACE at all for anything... any spider to squeeze through. The mountains were beautiful but I was thankful when the day came when we traveled down the mountains back to ACTS World Relief where we continued the rest of our stay in Haiti. There is still suffering from the destruction caused by the earthquake earlier this year, please pray for Haiti because the damage goes beneath what the eye can see; it’s rooted in hearts of many of the people. God is joy.
A camp the Dominican Republic set up for earthquake relief
No comments:
Post a Comment