Confession. Apology. Clean Slate.

You are missing out.

And it is my fault.

I was sharing with you student testimonies every Tuesday that are so powerful and so personal and so insightful and inspiring!  We found fantastic people ready to partner with the first few without any problems, but as time went on, I heard nothing from anyone several students in a row.  I was so very busy with the end of the year, interest seemed to be waning, so I just stopped.  Discouraged.  

Quite unfaithfully, I discourage easily.

And this isn't a post to tell you that suddenly, we heard from 90 people and now all the students are covered.  

Nope.  

But as I was reading through more testimonies this afternoon, singling out a good one to share this Sunday at church, I was floored and challenged and blessed, once again, by the stories of our students.  Of our Brothers and Sisters.  

Louis, who enrolled himself in first grade at NINETEEN.  Jean, who seemed to be one in a hopeless million, but whom God choose.  Moliere, who was destined to be a witchdoctor and who is now attending seminary on behalf of the small group who has become his family.  Jorgia, who says Emmaus  has become the family who abandoned her.

God's hand is MIGHTY in their stories, His faithfulness FAITHFUL, His call and heart LOUD.  

And because we weren't seeing the "results" it felt like we really needed  to see, I just gave up.

How sad.  I am sorry.

I'm picking it right back up, even thought it's not Tuesday, NOT because we have to find friends and family for these men and women to help pay to feed and care for and train them--though we do.

I'm sharing their stories because they are HIS stories of HIS hand and He is worthy of praise for them.  The stories of God at work in peoples lives MUST be shared, not for a result, but for Him.

You can always check the page at the top, "Meet First Year!" to read about lots of students in our first year class.  If you are ever passionate to partner one of them, just email me and I'll get you going!  

But even if you're not, read on, and be touched by His hand in the life of Louis.

Student: Louis Claudin

Family: married, baby on the way

Ministry Focus: mountain ministry

Testimony Highlights:

I was born in St. Michel into a Catholic family who was very very poor.  They explained to me when I was still very small how I had been born into misery.  I was born after four daughters, and my family had always hoped for a boy so that they would have a child who could provide for them.

In my whole family, everyone had girls and girls and girls, so while my mom and dad were very happy to have a son, my extended family became jealous.

Many people in the family were cursing me and spending time at the voodoo temple, trying to lift the curses in their own families.

After weeks of this, I finally died, or that is what my family told me.  All night, they screamed and cried for me, but in the morning, they ran and got my mother, and told her, “He is playing!  He isn’t dead anymore!  Come see!”

So I was alive again, they said, and even when I was little, they always told me about this.  They always had me in the Haitian Catholic Church, and finally I asked my mom when I was small, “How did I live when I was dead?  Was it God?”

“Yes,” she told me, “But we've never seen anything like that, so I guess it was THE God.”

“Then, I guess I can’t stay in the Haitian Catholic Church anymore, because there are many gods there and it seems that there is only one true.”

I left the Catholic church, and all of my sisters and my brother, born after me, all thought my reasoning was very sound, and left the Haitian Catholic church together…everyone but my mom.

I was so used to being in church, that when we left the Catholic Church we all started going to the community Gospel church. The first time I heard the true Gospel, I wanted it, and went to the front, asked them to pray for me, and became a Christian. 

When I led the family away from our tradition, my parents put me out, and I moved to Port-au-Prince to live with my uncle, who was a Christian pastor there. 

I didn’t like life in Port-au-Prince.  Life was very harsh and ugly there, and I came back to Fort-St. Michel and moved in with another cousin who lived in Cap-Haitian, and found a little work. 

I’ve always been a simple person.  What I find to do, I do. 

I had never been to school.  Ever.  Never been sent, never had a chance.

So, when I was 19, and I found this small job to clean a school, I took every penny I made and sent myself to school at the same place. 

At nineteen, I started first grade. 

I put myself through a few years of school, and then the school where I worked went under, and I lost my job.  There was a missionary in Cap-Haitian at the time, Vanessa, and when she saw I lost my job but wanted to keep getting my education, she helped me pay my tuition so that I could continue. 

Everytime things got incredibly difficult for me, all my friends told me to leave church, to leave God.  But I couldn’t.  He had given me my life, and even if I didn’t have 5 pennies to ride to church, I would walk an hour to be there.  I started teaching a Sunday school group in my church, and was finally baptized.  

I finally finished my schooling in 2011. 

I asked God what I should do, and in a vision that night a group of people came to me and said, “You work.  God gave you back your life for a reason.  Go find those people and tell them.”

I came and shared that with my pastor, and he started praying with me for my future.

In September 2013 I got married, and that was the same month I started in the Seminary.  There was a group people who knew Vanessa, and when Cholera passed over Haiti, I was helping them, and they were helping people in Haiti with Ambassador Medical.

When I felt called to Seminary, it was them who helped me find Emmaus and helped me come to the Seminary.

I would really like to work in the mountains.  I have always been a timid and gentle spirited person, and the city is hard for me.  I have a big heart for people living simpler lives in the mountains, to share the Gospel with them. 

There have been many challenges I my life.  The little bit that I have found has been stolen.  The difficulties in my life are huge.  But God helps me to forget these things and stay focused on Him and on studying His Word.  My wife and I live in Cap-Haitian. 

My wife is five months pregnant, and we are in the church near our house, working there with Pastor St-Il Joseph.

Pray for my family.  Pray for my family who still does not know Jesus.  Pray for God to continue to make ways for me to provide for my wife and to help with my family.  My mom is still deeply engrained in the Haitian Catholic Church, and I keep sharing. 

Join LOUIS now

(with 365693 LOUIS as your project)

meet Moliere!

Is Testimony Tuesday a good idea?  Several missionaries in Haiti have mentioned loving hearing the students stories...I hope that you are, too!

Very grateful for the special couple who has joined Joane (who missed the group picture :).  THANK YOU.  We still have so many students who need families/churches/groups to be praying for them, supporting them and holding their ropes while they continue to work and minister here in Haiti!

Another such young man is Moliere, a very perseverant and kind-hearted first year student whose testimony entirely surprised me.  His ongoing story of homelessness, Acts-type living and passion for the unreached is, well...amazing.    

He has a beautiful group of Haitian brothers and sisters here, selflessly helping him pay every tuition bill.  

Won't you pray about joining them, too, lifting Moliere up in prayer and helping Emmaus train, feed, house and send him out? 

Here's his story...

I was born in Petit-Guave 28 years ago, but I wasn’t raised by my parents, because when I was born, my mom was very sick. 

She immediately gave me to my godmother, a sister-in-law of my moms.  I grew up with her and her family, but when I was in fifth grade, I left there because things weren’t going well and I went and spent two years with my father.

My father was a witchdoctor, and living there with him I learned a lot about the Satanic world.  He worked to train me in his ways, but I quickly found that I did not want to follow in my father’s footsteps.  After two years,  I left him and went to town to continue my education.  During my eighth grade year, I began to follow Christ.

I didn’t have a plan to convert, that was for sure, and my family’s plan was that I was going to be in Voodoo.  But there was a friend of my mine always giving me advice and always telling me that the ways of God were so much better than the way I was going. 

I had always been doing voodoo things but when I left voodoo to follow Jesus and shared that with my family, my father said he would not pay for my schooling anymore.  He was paying for my house.  Now he wouldn’t pay for the house.  I was homeless.  And out of school.  Following Jesus, alone.

I missed two years of schooling, bouncing around from friends' house to friends' house just trying to survive.  Finally, I settled in with one friend, and his family helped me pay for school again. When it was time for high school, he helped me pay for that, too.  I was incredibly poor, and worked very hard to finish school. 

However, after high school, I once again had no one to help me and no where to live.  

For five years, I had nothing but my church. I was in church, I sometimes lived in the church, and I was always working with people there, working in a program they had there to teach people how to do evangelism. 

A group of friends and I started a Bible study/accountability/prayer group called “Spiritual Backup.”  I was studying the Bible a lot, because I had nothing else to do, and a lot of things being taught at our church became clear to me as not being what the Bible said.  As our group started pointing these things out, the church asked us to leave.

When they put us out, there was a member in the group who started hosting our group in their house, and it was this person who said, “Moliere, we need to send you to seminary for this group, so you can study more and teach us better so we can know the truth of the Word from the world of lies.”

The group all agreed, and came around me.  They took an offering, and it was just enough to sign up at Emmaus Biblical Seminary.  EBS gave me a bill, and each month, I take that bill to my group, and together, we all pay it. Every week, we meet together 3 times, and I teach them everything I learned that week at Emmaus.  In this sense, there are 12 of us studying at Emmaus through me!

I want to go everywhere.  I want to hit all the mountains.  I want to make people know.  I see that there are so many people in the mountains that don’t know the truth, and so many people still living in darkness, like my family, like I was, like even my church was.   I live right now in the home of the family who hosts our “Spiritual Back-Up” group, and I want to continue to learn, continue to share, and continue to step out on faith that He will provide! 

THANK YOU!

Please pray for Moliere, and if partnering with him is something your church, family, small group or organization would like to do, please consider joining his team!

Give by mail: One Mission Society

PO Box 1648

Monument, CO   801320

MEMO: MOLIERE 365690

Give online, project 365690 --MOLIERE

meet Joane!

SO grateful to have Jorgia fully sponsored and be moving on with Joane today!  THANK YOU!

I'd seen Joane in the area by Lily's school long before he joined us as a student at Emmaus, and met him at Pillatre Church before I met him in class.  Respectful, genuine, hard-working and patient, Joane is one of those people you WANT to be on your team...and now we need someone to be on HIS.

I'll let him tell you about his life and call...

"I didn’t have any Christians in my family whenever I was born, but when I came to be an age to go to school, they started sending me to Pillatre Christian School simply because it was right across the street.  All students at Pillatre were also required to go to church there, so I was raised in the church, though my parents never came.

There were 8 of us children, so when I was six (Haitian children starting school at age 3), my parents had to pull me out of school.  Things continued to get worse for my family, and when I turned 12, my parents finally gave me to my aunt.

My aunt took me and put me back in school right away and started taking care of me.  Until I was married not long ago, it has been my aunt who did everything for me and insisted I was always in church and worked hard at school.

When I was sixteen, I was working in so many different groups in the church with my aunt, and there was a kid’s group that I was a part of.  Not only was that the group where I met the girl who is my wife today, but it was through that children’s group that I truly gave my life to the Lord and became a Christian. 

When I was in ninth grade, I was teaching the little kids in Sunday school and singing in the choir.  Church leadership started to think that there was potential for me, and around 2010 they put me in the Deacons Class. 

I always wanted to go into theology, but people were always criticizing pastors and Christians and persecuting them, and that made me afraid.  However, I continued to pray that God would hold me fast to that vision if it was the one He had for me, and that He would be strong in my weakness, brave in my fears.

My wife and I were married 2012, and my wife is a teacher at the Pillatre Christian School.

Each time I prayed about what God wanted to do with my life, He affirmed my call to study and give God's Word, once even coming to me in a dream and handing me a Bible, telling me to learn it and GO.

I spoke to my pastor, who went to EBS many years ago, and he said, “If you want to grow in philosophy, go to Limbay University.  But if you want to grow spiritually, you go to Emmaus.”  So, I did!

I really love being in the Seminary, and it is only 5 minutes from my house and from Pillatre.  I have heard for so long about the quality of the service of the seminary, and it is true.  I have found a place to be challenged and to grow, and already the teaching I am doing in the church has become so much better.

I have been in my church since I was a little boy, and I would love to work there when I graduate, but I also know there are so many places that need a church and need the Word.  It’s God choice for us, and my wife is ready with me to go wherever He calls us. 

I really love teaching...I don’t know what God has, but I know He has a plan for my life.  Praise the Lord!"

Please pray for Joane, and is partnering with him is something your church, family, small group or organization would like to do, please join his team!

Give by mail: One Mission Society

PO Box 1648

Monument, CO   801320

MEMO: Joane 365689

Give online, project 365689 --JOANE

I LOVE sharing these stories and growing the Emmaus family here in Haiti!  THANK YOU!

1% today: it's still Jorgia.

A friend of mine attended a conference called "Celebration of Generosity" in Atlanta last week, and emailed to tell me that he learned that 99% of giving in the US stays in the US.  

99%.  While it blesses me to realize that America is giving generously to take care of America and hurting Americans...there is a WHOLE lot of His world left out of that percentage.  

I've got to think about that more, but for now...baby, it's Jorgia.  She still needs help, we still need help for her.

I was so moved by Jorgia's story that I've shared it myself with a visiting team, with our mission body and with our EBS family...but she's still not sponsored!

Two different friends have committed partial scholarships totaling $1000 (THANK YOU, Missions Committee of Farmland Friends Church and Jenn!), but that leaves Jorgia still in need of another $1000 to be fully sponsored this year!   I've got new student stories to share, but I'm committed to having each student funded before moving on to the next...

Whatever you do, take a minute to lift up our sister, and if you know of a friend, family, church group or even your dental hygienist who might be interested in partnering with what God is doing in Haiti through Jorgia, pass her story on!

So excited to be a part of His story through Jorgia...and we need you to be, too.

"I was born in Cap-Haitian to a Catholic family with five children.  When I was five years old, my mom had a chance to go to America, and took it. She moved to Florida, and I have not seen my mother since then.  It has been 22 years.

My father stayed with us, but when I was 10 years old, he unexpectedly died.  I moved in with my sister, who was married and had kids, and that is where I grew up.  

Today, all my brothers and sisters live in Florida, too, near my mom.  It is just me, and I have lived with my aunt since my sister left for America.  

As soon as my dad died and I started living with my sister and then my aunt, I have been in church.  They are both Christians, and always took me with them.  I loved being with people in the church, and was in several singing groups and then youth group and Sunday school.  And at the church we were attending, the Evangelical Church of Cap-Haitian, they were always emphasizing that even if we are in church or live with Christians, we still have to make a personal decision for Christ. 

In 2001, the youth group elected me to be a member, and asked, “Do you personally have a relationship with Jesus?”  

I didn’t, but I sure wanted to.  I converted then, and have been in this same church ever since.

After I finished high school, I didn’t know what to do, but my mom sent word that she wanted me in Port-au-Prince studying something that could make money.  So, I went to P-a-Prince to study economics, but during my first year there, the great earthquake shook Haiti, and my family sent me back to Cap-Haitian.  

Then, they decided to send me to a university in Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic.  Before you could do that university program, you had to do a four month intensive program in Spanish, so I started to study Spanish.

I felt so lonely in the Dominican, and there were hardly any other Haitians around me, and the Dominican people did not treat Haitian people like me very well.  So when I finally made a Haitian friend, I stuck with her, and one Sunday she took me to her church.

When we went in I was very shy, because there were only four Haitian people with very dark skin like me, and everyone else was Dominican and very light skinned.  I was worried they would also treat me very badly like everyone else had.  I didn’t want to be there at all.  When it was time to introduce visitors, my friend jumped up and pulled me up beside her.

I wanted to disappear into the floor, not stand out even more.  Then, to make it even worse, the pastor greeted me warmly, and told me to come down front.  I was sure they wanted me in the front to make me ashamed, and I did NOT want to go.  But my friend pulled me along, and when I got there I stared at the floor and wished to disappear.  

But then the pastor came to me, and talked to me, and then with his wife they held my hands, and prayed for me.  He told me that he felt that God had a plan for my life, and wanted to use me.  I didn’t understand what that was, but when I said to him, “What plan?” the pastor said, “I don’t know.  But God loves you and loves Haiti and has a plan to use you in Haiti.”

I was shocked and surprised. I was surprised God loved me.  I was surprised this man did.  I was surprised God wanted me in Haiti.  I was surprised that GOD had a plan for me...not just my mom from afar. And that day changed everything.

“Don’t waste you time and money,” my friend told me later at home, “Studying Spanish and studying economics or nursing or all the things your mom wants you to do from America is now a waste if God's got something else.  Don’t waste yourself on what other people want.  God has a plan for your life.  Make it His.”

I called my mom, and I told her I was done.  I told her that God had a plan for my life, and she was very unhappy.  She only wanted me to pursue a plan that had money involved, but I told her I was sorry and that I was listening to new direction.

So, I came back to Cap, went right to my pastor, and asked him how I could study the Bible so that God could use me in Haiti.  I always thought I would leave Haiti, like my family, but now, I felt like I was right where God wanted me to be.  I am called, like a missionary, to Haiti.

I knew about a school named Limbay, but he told me instead about a place called Emmaus.

Now, I call Emmaus my family.

It is true that I am learning a lot about God and the Bible and ministry through my classes at Emmaus.  But most, I am learning about God through the community at Emmaus.  

The way the Bible is telling me to carry myself, to live, to love, to make choices, to treat people...that is how I SEE life being lived at Emmaus.  And I am a part of that community.  

I want to work with youth.  I have a great burden for discipleship.  God put me in Haiti and brought me back again for a reason.  My future is His."

Pray with us for Jorgia, and if you feel led to join her Emmaus, please do!  We need your help!

Join JORGIA now

(with 365687 JORGIA as your project)

Email me and let me know if you or your family or church have committed to aligning with Jorgia...and we'll move on to the next student!  Praise the Lord!