Listen to Sermon: Transitions

Listen to Sermon: Keep Your Eyes on Jesus

This trip for many of us was a burning bush moment.  It’s funny! I believe there are burning bushes all around us but sometimes you have to go away outside your country, culture, and safety to come back and actually see the burning bushes in our back yard.  Then, what do you do with that? How do we stay awake at home to the burning bushes that God puts in our path? How do we revel in the unresolvable mystery of God and not try to define Him by what we want Him to be or think He should be?

On Monday we went back to Canaan. This time the school kids were singing and laughing and learning in their school that meets in the church that Awaken Haiti built. We painted and nailed and held little girls and teased little boys (See my FB for some pictures of the kids at school) and Tom taught a dental clinic.   It was a good day-a fast day.  Last night we showered off the dust (everything is covered in dust in Haiti), filled ourselves with some great Haitian food, and gathered on the outside porch to debrief the events of this past 5 days.  I feel like we crammed 3 weeks worth of sights, sounds, emotions, and work into, really, 4 days.  We shared for two hours as thoughts or memories or still small voices were brought to our minds, drawn up from the deep well of our hearts.

For most of us Haiti was was we expected but so much more. For most of us we came knowing how it would go and we leave humbled and surprised at the complexities, nuances, tensions, and hidden surprises that make Haiti the ugly beautiful place that it is!

We leave this morning for the airport! We touch down in DC at 5:00 P.M. We’ve backed our bags that we will lug through the airport. We bring our bodies home to our family and friends but for all of us we will leave a part of our hearts in Haiti.  May we not forget!

We started yesterday (Sunday) by going to worship at Port-Au-Prince Fellowship. The church is English speaking and mostly European and American Christian aid workers and missionaries attend there. The place was packed and electric with energy.  I have to tell you, it is so much fun worshipping with a room packed full of people seeking God.  The people who attended are giving giving giving all week. They are dishing out emotionally and spiritually and they come into Sunday looking to be filled up and energized.  As we sang the whole room was alive with fervor in the anticipation that God’s love and power is made aware to us as the community of Jesus gathers together.  As I said yesterday Sunday was a roller coaster. We started at the top of the hill….but we would not stay there.

After PAP Fellowship we got in the truck and went on a driving tour of PAP. I didn’t mention yet but the truck we have traveled in this week is actually a cage on wheels. The truck is a box truck but the box is actually a wire cage.  I know what a chicken feels like now  Cage is a big wire mesh box fastened to the back of a European style diesel truck.  There are two bench seats on each side of the cage-enough to seat 20 people.  This is how we saw PAP…from the inside. Locked out from them or maybe the other way around..I don’t know.   I just can’t imagine the psychological toll this city must take from its inhabitants. The two main symbols of Haitian pride were the National Cathedral and the Palace. Both were completely destroyed in the earthquake. Both are just concrete spires of rubble, just haunted looking shadows of a past glory (like the erie ruins of a European castle).  Everywhere you go there are still piles of rubble reminders that time has not healed these wounds.  In addition to the crumbling palace (imagine our White House cracked in two and laid bare for two years) and the endless tattered tent cities there is also a slum called Cite’ Solia (sp?). This slum was here before the earthquake and will be here for a long long time. It has 300 thousand people living in it, if you call that living. No sanitation. No clean anything. No running water. No sewers. Nothing but grime and stench. It was hell to look at. I mean it. Hell! It was hell to smell it. It was hell to drive past it. I can’t imagine what it must be like to no nothing else of life itself. How long? (see last night’s post).

After driving through the city we went back to the Good Sam Home for Girls. The boys joined us and we laughed and played water balloons.  Ky Colestock brought some great beads and supplies to make bracelets. The girls loved it! My girls would have loved it too.  I’m going to bring them here as soon as they are old enough! Get ready Karis and Addy.  The Hempels brought cardboard cars for us to assemble with the boys. I helped Junior make his. You can see a picture on my FB.  We had a blast!  The contrast between PAP and the love and hope that exists in the orphanage is amazing.  After that valley it was great to have a mountain to stand on for a few hours!

Ok. That’s the gist of yesterday. Today we go back to Canaan!

Peace

jon

I will elaborate more tomorrow but the crux of it is that we visited Port-Au-Prince (PAP) today. I’ve been to third world countries. I’ve been to Cambodia, Mexico, and I’ve never seen anything like this. Two years later there are tattered tent cities full of young families stacked on top of each other. Imagine a world with no waste management. Imagine a world where city sewers are not hidden discretely underneath our feet-out of sight out of mind.  Imagine a world where all you do is camp day after day, week after week, month after month, and now year after year.  Rain, heat, sun, and sweat…and you are in it with thousands-as far as the eye can see from the sidewalk. This town is crumbling and it was crumbling before the earthquake and it still shudders in garbage and filth and hot humid stomach turning stench.

This is not what humans were made for. . . How long?

I drive by these places in sitting in the back of a truck….a man showers his body on the side of the road…we are driving through his bathroom.  A young mom chases her stark naked two year old…we are driving in her nursery. A 15 yr. old boy hangs out with his pals, huddled around, playing Rock Band drums on hollow plastic buckets…we are driving through his bedroom.  I feel shame that this potted road takes me through the inner chambers of their lives.  Yet, we cannot look away! We cannot burry our heads in our glossy mail order catalogues. We cannot shrug, we cannot save, we cannot fix, we can’t control!  How long?

I drive through their lives and think…Egypt. Israel. Slavery. Slavery slums and ramshackle chains. For 400 years they cry out…”How long?”

Psalms 6

Have mercy on me, LORD, for I am faint;
heal me, LORD, for my bones are in agony.
³ My soul is in deep anguish.
How long, LORD, how long?

⁴ Turn, LORD, and deliver me;
save me because of your unfailing love.

Good night! Be blessed and grateful for more than you know or can imagine. A gift. It’s all gift.

Jon

Listen to Sermon: Taking Time Out

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

Important things are happening in the dark and cold that prepare us for the new growth and abundance of spring. As a church body, we’re looking to this season as a time to grow in depth and strength in preparation for a season of renewed growth and outreach.

One of the best ways to experience growth is to join a community group. Community groups will be meeting every week or every other week (depending on the group) starting Jan. 15th.

Community Groups @ Engage
(These groups are made up of 10-20 people who commit to meet together for the semester)

Wow, full day. Good day. First I’ll give you a run down of our day and then some thoughts.

We left Awake Haiti guest house around 8:45 and drove over rocky dusty roads to the Good Samaritan boys home. Awaken Haiti rents this house. The earthquake completely flattened the house next to the Boys home and severely damaged the house to its right…however, the Good Sam Boys home was not damaged at all.

We spent the next 5 hours painting this house on the inside. It turned out fantastic! Kristin Tuckey is an interior designer so she was all bossing us around telling us what color to paint what. We had two colors-beige and white…but she was in her glory…oh, and we painted the front screen double door red.  It turned out great. Got the whole house painted inside!!  While we were painting most of the 7 boys who live there were at school except for Luben and Lubenson. These boys are four year old twins. They are so cute! They were loving the paint in all the most messy four year old ways imaginable.

One of the fun aspects for some of the Engage peeps on our trip is that they get to meet their sponsored child(ren) for the first time.  Nate and Jessie H. sponsor Luben and Luben helped Nate paint like the whole time. Check out my FB to see a picture. The Sokolofskys sponsor Lubenson, Luben’s twin brother.

After we painted the house we left in the mid-afternoon to go visit and hang out with the girls at the Good Sam Girls Home.  As soon as we arrived Randie T. was greeted by Stephanie with a kiss on the cheek and a huge hug. Randie and Doug have sponsored her for several years and Randie has adopted Stephanie into her heart foe show Kristin T. got to meet her sponsor child for the first time.  You could should have seen the smile on Kristin’s face as she hugged Kevencia, a bright smiling girl of seventeen. Kevencia is being groomed by the founders of the home to take it over one day and run Good Sam Girl’s Home. You can see Kevencia’s nurturing leadership in the way the younger girls respond to her, balancing playfulness with confidence and respect.

Tom and Ky C. did a dental check up on all the kids. First, Tom gave a talk to the girls about dental hygiene and Junior our translator made Tom sound pretty convincing. His name in Creole is Poppa Tom, but we already knew that! Tom and Ky sponsor a cute 11 yr. old girl named Lovely–she is! KY did great as his loving assistant. Older couples still in love are so cool!

Some of the women on our trip brought acrylic paint and invited the girls to paint their hands and make hand prints on one of the walls in their house. That led to painting flowers and hearts. And that led to one of the girls painting this crazy purple Haitian Barney looking bird thing! It was like the twitter bird but purple and lumpy.

My girls sent silly bands and playdough with me. This made me quite popular. So I sat down in the middle of the room and started making shapes with the playdough. Soon after, I was swarmed with girls making shapes and throwing playdough balls back at me I broke out my iphone and started showing the kids a picture of themselves on the front facing camera.  Soon after we started the boys arrived and flocked to the technology (it’s a man thing  So I met Redegy and we started started playing marathon games of Fruit Ninja and Angry Birds. Some say love is the universal language. I’m sure that’s true but so is Fruit Ninja.  It was hilarious because these 10-11 yr old boys beat all of my top scores in like the first 10 minutes…sharp as a wip.

Each night we have a group debrief from the events of the day. Tonight Jeff recalled several years ago when they first started coming to Haiti-long before Awaken Haiti was established. He said the girls would just flock and swarm he and Deb and others when they came to visit.  They were starving and thirsty souls in desperate need of hope.  Hope that life is more than dying parents. Hope that life is more than abandonment. Hope that life is more than feeling hungry and boredom.  When you are just surviving you are so starving for hope that you will try to grab every ounce of it from whomever is willing to give it to you.  Jeff said in the early days they would give all the emotional energy they had to give and that still wasn’t enough. Fast-forward several years. When Jeff and Deb and others visit today the girls greet them like my kids when I come home from work, “Hey dad, what’s up?”  Simple, short, hello.  This is actually a good thing because it means the kids are living, not just surviving.  The girls are full; not just full bellies but full souls. They sing and laugh and play and invent games and laugh in little girl circles. They are fully alive fully reflecting the joy and delight of God shining through, mending their fragile heart, and restoring the trust that they are indeed beloved daughters of God in the messy, scarred, chaotic, beautiful, joyous, alive, and delightful contradiction that is Haiti.  TTYL

Jon

In this last year alone Awaken Haiti has built a church and school and started a medical clinic in Canaan (a displaced refuge camp that is now a permanent town, just with no infrastructure). Awaken Haiti resources Good Samaritan House where orphaned boys and girls are loved.

Ok, time for bed. We are on EST time zone so be thinking and praying for us as you think to check in on the Engage Blog.

January 11
Greetings Engage family and friends,

Check in here on this blog page as we will be blogging daily from Haiti.  Tomorrow morning Tom and KY Colestock, Nate and Jessie Hempel, Kristin Tuckey, and me (Jon Hand) will be joined by 6-7 other friends from local churches and we will be flying to Port au Prince, Haiti for 5 days of discovering and learning about the mission of Awaken Haiti.

Here is our itinerary:
Day 1 - Thursday - Leave Carlisle at 2:15 AM. That’s right! AM!!!! Ugh. We will arrive in Haiti after a stop and layover in Miami. Arrive Haiti 4:20 PM.

Day 2-Friday Jan 13 - Work day at Good Samaritan Orphanage- painting, other odds and ends at both the boy’s and girl’s homes. Begin dental checks with our very own dental expert Tom Colestock.

Day 3- Saturday - Work in the new refuge city of Canaan (pronounced ka-naw). We will be playing with kids, working on a church building, helping in a medical clinic, playing soccer and games with kids in Canaan, and doing home visits to just BE with people. We will end the day with a bonfire with kids from the orphanage!

Day 4-Sunday- While you are at Engage Church we will be worshiping with a Haiti community of Jesus. I’ve heard these things go for 2.5 hrs. You thought Engage was long…plus…they don’t do the services in English. In the afternoon we will be take a tour of Port-au-Prince. The city is still in shambles from the earthquake.  In the mid-afternoon we will spend time with the kids at the orphanage making bracelets and doing some dental check ups.  In the evening we will do a little outdoor swimming since the weather will be in the 80s. !!

Day 5-Monday-Work day # 2 in Canaan. We will be working on an outdoor central kitchen (since the homes do not have kitchens), painting buildings, and teaching dental hygiene.

Day 6-Tuesday-Return home and arrive at Regan Int. at 5:00 P.M. whew!

Stay tuned each day for daily blog posts from our trip. Let’s go on this together.

Here is a link to Awaken Haiti so you can learn more.