Right after receiving a “Happy 50th Birthday” text from my precious wife, my good friend Pastor Mike Wilkerson was the first one in Haiti to wish me a happy birthday … he confessed that my wife reminded him to do so! I felt loved anyway! I was thankful to not only wake up to another day with Christ, but the Lord had given me 50 years!
I passed on the goat stew and onions over rice for breakfast, knowing I had to preach later in the afternoon. This was a big day of teaching as we planned on encouraging and reminding our fellow Haitian pastors of God’s gracious gift of faith, hope, and love through Jesus Christ and His finished work on the cross. We prayed that God would use this second day of the conference to deepen and widen the pastors’ understanding of the gospel for not only for their everyday lives but in their time of need in light of the earthquake’s massive destruction. We prayed for the pastors to be renewed and strengthened in the gospel so that they would be able to go back to their towns to minister the gospel to their people in deeper and more relational ways.
The morning started with a surprise as Thomas Kim, the executive director of Churches Helping Churches shared with all of the pastors that today was my 50th birthday and they all sang Happy Birthday to me-I think it was in English?! God blessed the entire day of worship as the Haitians belted out hymns from
memory, despite the different denominations represented. When I commented to one translator that all of the pastors knew these hymns by heart, he explained that with the extreme poverty, each family would purchase one hymn book and they would bring it for their Sunday gatherings, but everyone in the family would end up memorizing the hymns-this was a beautiful example of how poverty yields a beautiful blessing! I was so moved by the worship as the chapel “shook” from the thunderous and passionate singing as every pastor sang with great conviction in spite of their extreme suffering. In like manner, during Pastor Justin Holcomb’s sermon, we felt an actual aftershock that lasted for only a few seconds-this slight tremor gave me a sober reality check of what the Haitian’s experienced-I can’t imagine! But the pastors didn’t run or react, so we took our cues from them!
I had the privilege of preaching about God’s love on my birthday! My sermon, entitled, “Great Love in Great Suffering,” was taken from 1 John 4:7-21. I prayed that the Lord would help His people to see and understand His love for them and to remind them that His love is based neither on their subjective feelings or perspective, nor on their life circumstances. In fact, God’s love is not defined by us in any way. But by His Spirit, we know God’s love (vv. 7-11), we live in His love (vv.12-16), and we grow in His love (vv. 17-21) as we live in Christ. God’s love is declared most personally and concretely in the suffering and sacrifice of His Son Jesus Christ:
9This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. 10This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. (1 John 4:9-10)
During a Q&A time that followed the teaching sessions, a pastor shared that he had taught the 1 John 4 passage many times, but he never saw the connection that his failure to love made him a hypocrite. He went on to share that the Lord convicted him deeply about being a hypocrite-he was referring to the point I made that growing in God’s love drives out hypocrisy (cf. v. 20), “If anyone says, “I love God,” yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen.” He shared very openly and honestly that he was bitter against a friend who distributed relief aid to surrounding churches, except to him and his church. I praised God not only for the Spirit’s conviction but also for compelling the pastor to share transparently before his fellow pastors.
Mike Wilkerson and I skipped dinner as he debriefed the small group leaders. As the meeting progressed with many questions and demands for training, I began to question whether we promised too much in the area of equipping the pastors for gospel counseling, given that we had limited time, resources, and the inherent challenges of translation over a span of only two and a half days. I expressed my discouragement and burn out during our debrief meeting with the American team, knowing that I still had to lead two practical skills training sessions the next day. But the Lord faithfully restored my perspective and sense of hope during our prayer time, along with a good night’s rest during a cool night. God reminded me that we live in the midst of a relentless spiritual battle and that I need to keep clinging to my Christ.