corazón por Haití

Last night, I spoke in front of the youth group about Haiti.
I first shared with the kids about my passion for missions, the fire that lights in my heart when I hear about the "GO" part of Riverview's mission. This all got started on my first mission trip ever in the summer of 2005- in Haiti. At the time, I didn't really know why I was going. I just knew that it was a good thing and that's what Christians do. Love God, help others.

There's an immense need for water in Haiti. The average Haitian consumes and uses 3 liters of water per day, while the average American consumes and uses around 500 liters of water per day. So we worked to meet that need by building "raincatchers"- these gutter-filtration systems that catch and hold up to 3 gallons of water. It was amazing to see the joy on people's faces when we would come hiking to their homes with all of our supplies.

But it wasn't until later that someone told me that people are much less likely to hear and accept their spiritual needs being met.

On top of that, Haiti is a very spiritually dark place. Even though the nation is officially Roman Catholic, voodoo is believed in and practiced by a majority of haitians. Even within the Catholic church, people think they can practice both catholicism AND voodoo and there is nothing wrong with it.

Voodoo may seem silly to us, the way it's portrayed in movies, but it's really not a joke. When I was on the trip, our group was walking through a village square and a woman was chanting and screaming things at us. She was cursing us for the work we were doing there.

After all that's happened there with the earthquakes and aftershocks, if you were to look at a haitian and tell them, "Bondye renmen ou" (God loves you) chances are extremely slim that they would believe you.

So how will they know? How will the people of Haiti know that the God who created the universe loves them with an undeniable love and has saved them from spending eternity in hell? How will they know we we who do know just sit here and do nothing?