BARON: the unreached

Before long, people all over the mountain top were asking about this Son of God.  Though literacy is rare, the stories and passages Ezekiel read from the Word were passing house to house like fire in the drought season.

The new believers quickly outgrew his parents small hut, and a sandy piece of property owned by one of the new believers was given over for a church.

Piece by piece the wood was split and smoothed by men in the “church”, and in about a month, Ezekiel and his father had built this small place of worship.  The twal was brought up from the village below shiny piece by piece, and soon the church had it’s cover from the blazing sun. 

Sunday, I saw a lot of things I’ve never seen before, but one of the most beautiful was Cher Pas (Dear Pastor) standing before the crowded church of 50-60 believers in an attitude no different than the attitude of the man I had just spent 5 hours driving and hiking with. 

Ezekiel was Ezekiel, and with no fancy speech and no pompous display, he jumped right into greeting his family and joining them in prayer. AND, he preached in jeans.

I know your pastor might preach in jeans, and I know a lot of pastors do.  In other countries.

But I swear to you that in five years, I have NEVER seen a Haitian pastor preach in jeans, much less wear jeans in church.  If you are important, you dress like you are important, and that is that. 

We have struggled for years over the cultural expectancy that you will NOT go to church if you can’t arrive in fine dress and shiny shoes.  To see dirty, sweaty, jeaned Ezekiel stand before his family just as he was meant others in the church…others who have never had shiny shoes and never will…could praise the Lord as they were, too.

And they did.  We did.  As we were.  I wore $1.25 Old Navy sandals for the whole hike up the mountain, and I wore $1.25 Old Navy sandals the whole service.  Lots of people weren’t wearing shoes at all, and I didn’t get the sense that anyone thought God cared.

“You all know the story of the woman who was bleeding!” Ezekiel shared right at the start of the service, paper chains and flowers blowing gently in the slight breeze overhead. 

“She was bleeding, oh, for such a long time.  Every day, suffering.  And when she left her home that morning in search of Jesus, she had one motivation.  There was just one thing she wanted to do…and that was touch Jesus.  She didn't get anything else in her mind.”

“If you came here this morning,” he shared humbly and matter-of-factly with the congregation “with any other motivation, you will most definitely leave here disappointed.”

“But if we come together today to touch Jesus, and to be touched by Him, trusting and knowing that He is all we need, then we will be satisfied deeply in Him.  Amen? Amen.”

Noel led us in worship after Ezekiel prayed, and with more and more people joining me on the rickety school bench I perched on, I had a surreal moment.

How did I get here???  I am a prissy girl from Ohio.  I was going to be a ballerina.  Then a musician.  Then a journalist.  I love Rocky Road.  I love Cincinnati Reds games, heated seats, log cabins, penguins.  I don’t remember not being able to read.  I've had Lasik.  I went to a tiny high school and a tiny college in a tiny town in Kentucky.  I’ve been to Paris, to London.  I have a major obsession with holiday themed candy, I’ve been white-water rafting, I have a major problem of calling people by nicknames they never gave me permission to use, I was a vegetarian for years, I wanted to change the world.

And here I sat.  Crammed on a broken bench in a filthy skirt, dripping sweat. On the tippy top of a mountain a million miles from…anything.  Singing my heart out with family I just met in a language I didn't know existed a few years ago, nothing with me but my battered camera and a dirty bottle of hot water the four of us had been sharing all day.

Like Ezekiel, this wasn’t what I had planned.  And yet, I was, I am completely and totally and joyfully satisfied by His presence.

And here it was, just as Ezekiel said...at some point in my life, I realized that more than anything else, I just wanted to touch Him, and be touched by Him, and reach for Him with my brothers and sisters.

Behold, family, our brothers and sisters.  Bought with the same blood.  Freed by the same price.  What a unity we have found in Him.  What a deep joy, to be His.

Junior quickly snapped me out of my heart wanderings, stepping to the front of the church with a huge bloody piece of cloth wrapped around his thumb, a small ladder and Bible in his hand, quickly jumping into 2^nd Peter 1.

“You see verse 5?” Junior asked, with all the humility just displayed by Ezekiel but with the power of the Holy Spirit that comes out through Junior if you can get him to preach.  “Make every effort.  Apply all diligence.  We've got work to do!”

“Yes, we died to our sin and received His forgiveness and have new life in Him and will spend eternity with Him.”  

“But we are not finished.  He is not finished!  We must spend every one of our days making every effort to be like Him…to live like Him!”

He then pulled out his ladder--which I later learned had caused him to machete through his thumb in the making--and starting with verse 5, went through all the qualities God asks us to strive for in our journeys with Him, using each rung of the ladder to help us visualize these stages in holy living.

Moral excellence, knowledge, self-control.  Perseverance, godliness, kindness, love.  He elaborated on each one, pulling other passages from Scripture into each description, bringing to life what these things are and look like, repeating them over and over pointing to the rungs of the ladder, knowing he was sharing with a largely illiterate audience who would have to put to memory the passage.

For as long as you practice these things, you will never stumble.

Ezekiel, who never gets a turn to sit on the other side of the pulpit, was visibly moved and encouraged by the hour of intense feeding, and all I could think of as Junior finished frape kè m was, “I have BEEN to church today!”

I closed us out in prayer, blessed by His presence and the presence of those around me, and then spent a few minutes meeting some of the people now overflowing the tiny church. 

Thirty minutes later we sat around a little bench with heaping plates of greasy rice and…meat-ish-something, and Ezekiel couldn’t stop grinning.

“I thought Junior, Stacey, Noel coming was the blessing of the day.  But that was only the beginning.  Junior, you must share that message everywhere.  We must continue to preach the Gospel.   Look.” Ezekiel urged, voice going soft, emphatically pulling the three of us into a huddle like he had a secret to share.

“We must continue studying and preaching the Gospel.  It is all that we have to offer.  All that we have to offer rich city people, poor mountain people.  It’s all we have, it’s all we need.  We must continue, yes.  Let’s continue!  We can’t grow faint.”

He looked solemnly into our eyes as we made a hearty silent pact and returned to our rice. 

What I had hoped we might in some small way be able to give Ezekiel--encouragement--he had miraculously received in a powerful way.