Best of the week entry 3

Is a two-fer from Provocations and Pantings and deals with the situation in Haiti. The first post, Can Anything Good Come Out of Haiti? Pt 1 deals with the heartwrenching situation of the ground. Can Anything Good Come Out of Haiti? Pt 2 deals with why there is hope, hope in the form of a young man from Haiti who came to America to help his people, not by looking for a handout but a job:

Joseph didn’t say much. His English was rather broken, his heart even more for his people. Like most Haitians, he was well-dressed, and every time I approached him, he responded with a quiet hello and bowed head. I just thought he was here to visit some family (which he was), but soon I came to realize it was so much more. In the earthquake this past January, Joseph lost nearly everything. His father, hero, and mentor was killed while in the church building where he invested his life pastoring God’s people. Joseph’s house was completely destroyed, his wife trapped inside and now medically impaired. The three-story building in Port-au-Prince where the church and orphanage was located collapsed, killing nine orphan children. In this building was stored all the Bibles, musical instruments, sound equipment, and teaching materials for all nine churches he had started over the past 15 years. On top of this, one of the members in the church in Port-au-Prince, a high-ranking government official who funded a large amount of the food supplies for the orphans, was killed in the earthquake, leaving Joseph will a state of desperate need one can only imagine bearing alone.

So a homeless 33 year-old man who just buried his father and sent his wife to a hospital in the Dominican Republic ended up in my city because, as he later told me, the children in his churches “no longer had food to eat”. He didn’t come to get a handout from our church. He came looking for a job so that he can bring some money back to feed these children who looked to him as their grandfather. What he did not know was there are no jobs here in our city (that’s another story), and so he was left to attending church at Grace while trusting God for a miracle.

Wonderful story and it gives you hope in the midst of despair. Give them a read.