One Voice. With Joy.

I just spent an hour with Junior, and I feel my heart could burst.

I wish you could have sat with us, family--it's almost just not fair that I get to sit and listen to his heart and all you get is a pale version typed out by me.  I barely know how to share with you the things he told me.  

On Tuesday, he went to the family meeting to discuss all the details for the funeral.  He said the whole time he felt so out of place.  Everyone talked of the great powers and magic his father had done over the years.  Everyone talked about the ceremonies and curse-casting that would make up his funeral.  Junior said he was feeling more and more frustrated and angry, realizing how the family worshipped Ti-Paul and how darkness would just continue to be celebrated.

As they discussed which witchdoctors would do which parts of the service, Junior said he couldn't stand it any more, and got up to leave.

"They wanted me to stay and eat, all of us eat together...and I was so sick and overwhelmed and sad and I just didn't want to take ANYTHING from them.  I didn't want them to give me anything.  I left, so righteously angry...SO ANGRY that in my father's death, we were going to keep SHROUDING people's eyes.  Keep continuing them in the darkness and lies my father dedicated his life to giving them.

"So I went to my room and I cried and stewed and prayed and I couldn't even sleep, and at 2 am, the Lord spoke to me.  He told me, Junior, you will do it.

the mormon temple where the service was held

"And I told the Lord that they wouldn't let me do it, and that all the plans had already been made, and that I was the outcast son, and half my siblings don't even know my name, and I asked the Lord again, Seriously?"

"You have my authority, the Lord told me," said Junior.  "It has been given to you.  And that's it."

I didn't know until now that when Junior called us before dawn on Wednesday, telling me that he would be doing the funeral, that he hadn't even TALKED to his family yet.  He hadn't seen them!  

Talk about faith.  

God told Junior to do it, and Junior called me and many others and told us he would be doing it, telling me "the funeral has been given to me", and asked us to get Matt to Port-au-Prince and asked for help and prayers...all before he had even mentioned the thought to his family.

"What if they had said NO, Junior?" I asked him in disbelief today.

"Uh, God had already given me the authority, Stace.  It didn't matter what they said.  God told me I was doing it, so that's what I told you!"

So he set everything up with us for Matt to go, and THEN headed to his family to tell them that he would be doing the funeral.  He said he stood before them, and said, "You will not be doing any of the things you planned yesterday.  The witchdoctors will not be doing the funeral.  I will be doing it, and my family is coming."

And he said everyone looked at each other and immediately said, "Oh.  Ok."

I mean...whaaaaa?  That's as crazy as a pebble dropping a giant, for heavens sakes.

Then he shared with me a story from long ago, just a few years after he became a Christian.  He said that he was sharing with Greg, the good friend who introduced Junior and I, about his burden for his father and the other two witchdoctors in the area.  

crowds trying to get into the temple, flags hiding the service from view

Ti-Paul led them: one of them was a man Ti-Paul was discipling named Anel, and the other a particularly ruthless man whose signature was (still is) eating the people he cursed and killed.  Junior and Greg put together a prayer plan for these three men, and Junior pulled it out of his Bible even today, 10 years later.  

He says that that day, he and Greg committed to praying for those three men, one of two things: that their lives, transformed and given to Jesus, would be the door through which many would come to know Him, or that if they did not convert, that it would be their deaths that God would use for His glory.

A few years later, after years of prayer and work, Junior led the youngest of the three, Anel, to the Lord.  "It was then that the persecutions of my father really intensified," Junior told me today, a story I've never heard him share before.  

Ti-Paul's grave, in the middle of the temple

"I worked with him and shared with him and discipled him, and he converted and grew in the Lord and started a church in his home for his family and left Voodoo and my father completely.  But from the moment Anel converted, my father became nasty to me.  My father has been a terrible man to many people, but I am sure that there is no one on this earth my dad persecuted more than me, because of this conversion.  I had not only left him, but now I was taking from him."

Then Junior shares with me that yesterday, when they were all packed into that temple, around the grave, all three of the men he's been praying for all these years were there.  His dad, dead in the grave, Anel, now a pastor of a church in the same area, and Serge, the cannibalistic witchdoctor still left in the zone.  

Anel and Junior

All the witchdoctors and assistants who had been preparing the temple for the grave and burial hadn't come to the service in the mormon temple.  THAT'S why it was so important to Junior that he and the guys be in the temple and have the chance to share the Gospel.

"Stace, my father influenced SO many people for darkness.  And I have prayed many times that if my father remained blind unto death, that I would have the chance, through the doorway of his death, to share His Light to ALL those same people.  And yesterday, I did.  We did!"

the temple where Ti-Paul worked and lived, where Junior grew up, and where Ti-Paul is buried

"And when I finished, Anel came out of the crowd to the edge of the grave.   He is now a pastor of a church, and with such boldness, Stacey, he shared with everyone his testimony, and of the discipleship of Ti-Paul, and then the discipleship I had given him, and the miraculous change in his life.  It was powerful!"

As for Serge, for the first time, Junior was able to share the Gospel with him, and it wasn't until every person had heard that the guys prayed and left the chaos.

Inside Ti-Paul's temple, voodoo drums and talismans and potions all cast to the side for the grave to be dug

"I am not sad ANYMORE, Stacey," Junior told me today.  "I had hoped my Dad would come to the Lord.  But instead, it was his death God used to give me, his son, the chance to share the Truth with every person who had followed his lies.  I'm nothing but grateful.  God paved the way, made it happen, and gave me the desire of my heart."

When they all got back today, I walked out to the truck.  A few weeks ago, the cover and cage we've always had on the back of the truck to provide shade for passengers cracked our truck bed, and we had to take it off.  

The entire truck was covered in a thick layer of dust, and dry vomit was caked all over the floor.  

images of St. Jaque and St. Barbara inside Ti-Paul's temple

Belo, dear Belo, vomits the entire trip, every trip, EVERY SINGLE time he travels.  Every single trip we've ever taken together.  And if you've been to Haiti, you know people HATE to be in the sun.  Avoid at all costs being in the sun.  It's insanely hot, and no one wants to be any darker, and everyone hates to arrive somewhere dirty and sweaty.

As I looked in that filthy truck bed this afternoon, it really hit me for the first time that our guys voluntarily, for the sake of their brother and the Gospel, sat in that truck bed for 6 hours in the blazing hot sun, choking down the dust, one of them vomiting, at last minutes notice.  

I was deeply moved.  Again.  

Matt was, too.  "I told them I was so sorry, and you know what they said?  They said, 'Pastor Matt, we're bondslaves of Jesus.  It's nothing.  It's a joy."

And there you have it.  

Voodoo temples.  Witchdoctors.  Politicians.  Demon possession.  Fighting.  Drinking. 100 degrees.  Complete and total strangers.  Cannibalism.  No money.  No prestige.  Risk of harm.  Not their battle.  

and None of that even MATTERS.

It is a Joy.  Because of Christ.  The only Voice that matters.  The only Authority.

THAT'S WHAT I WANT.  

One Voice, With Joy.  

No. Matter. What.

Praise the Lord for the chance to be a part of this, for the opportunity to share it with you, and for the way His new reality--dawning on the lives of many for the first time--is MINE.

Jean Marc, Simeon, Jodenel, Belony, Leandre, Berthil, Gesner, Simeon, and Junior, with Joy!