clearly | chaos

So we just got back a couple days ago from leading worship at CDYC 2009.  What an awesome group of people!  The guys and gals running this thing have such an incredible heart for students… it’s obvious when you’re on the campus of Indiana Weslyan with hundreds of Junior High kids running around and these guys love every single second!

It was honestly a pleasure leading with the camp staff for the week.  The band and I had a blast.

It really was crazy though… I guess Junior high kids always blow me away.  Just the way they will actually do ANYTHING… be crazy loud… jump around… and then when there are moments, they are just dialed in.  Quiet.  Focused.

Not to say they will stay quiet for long… haha… but they really can get there.  They are rarely ‘too cool’, and they honestly express themselves however they want to… it’s honestly refreshing.

God showed up.  Big.  In moments… in songs… it’s always crazy to me how that happens… God speaks through His people.  I honestly don’t know how it works, but those moments keep me going… fill me up…

even though I’m still crazy tired, I can’t wait to head out again in a couple weeks to lead at another camp full of students… God has just wired a generation to experience Him through music, and I’m so glad I get to be a part.

Here’s a link to facebook for some pics my wife took while we where there: http://bit.ly/HXvCy

cheers,
j

Oh, we played a bunch of tunes off the FEE album this week that I haven’t led before… WOW.  well done steve fee, well done. Incredible songs.

So I’m still not sure how to process what happened down there.  It just comes in flashes really.  Or I walk into Wal-Mart and it comes in big huge waves.  I get in my nice clean car.  I drive to this huge building that is our church.  I talk to people my whole day… and most of them just can’t see what I’ve seen.  It’s hard to describe until you’ve smelled it, tasted it, seen it, stood right in the middle of it.  So that’s hard.  It’s hard describing “how was the trip?” when people ask.

“I don’t know… good? bad? awesome? incredible? God inspired? terrible?”

Yeah, pretty much all of those… and more.

But now I’m home, and those waves keep hitting me, right in front of me and sometimes sneak up on me.  It’s like I don’t really want them to, but I know that once the waves stop hitting me, I’m becoming adjusted again. Adjusted to me world of indulgence and excess.  The truth is, it’s hard to go on a trip like that.  It’s messes with you.  GOD messes with you.  But I think that’s just the way it’s supposed to happen.

So my next step, in these next weeks and months is to be different.  To look for things that God taught me and showed me while I was down there… and then this is the really hard part… CHANGE.

I’m gonna try and break that part of me that gets in our 1992 Buick Roadmaster and wishes I wasn’t because the paint is old and the radio is broken and it doesn’t have AC.

I’m gonna try and break that part of me that thinks I’ve gotta come up with the next great thing to help our church grow.  The next awesome programming element or the next killer worship tune or video or whatever… what will make our church grow is GOD, and HIM ALONE.  And the power of the Gospel will change hearts not anything that I will do, or create, or think of.  The problem is I can get obsessed with what’s next, and miss what’s NOW and what’s been FOREVER UNCHANGING… I can get obsessed with reading blogs, and checking websites, and watching videos and miss what God may be saying in the quiet and in His word.  So I’m gonna slow down, and break that part of me that tries to create, and let creativity flow from HIM.

They didn’t really need anything we would consider “cool” to see the Gospel change lives in Haiti… they just need the Gospel.  They read it.  Then they lived it.

Sorry these thoughts are still a little raw… It’s only been a little over a week and I’m still processing.

I can’t seem to wrap my head around some parts… but I know God is shaping things, and I know that those of us who went will never be the same.

cheers,
j

It’s the last day.  Strange.  I’m writing the day after though.  I’m sitting on the couch in my air conditioned house.  feels like a million miles away from the streets of Haiti.  Believe me, it’s going to take me a while to process what God did in me this past week… but before I get too far from it, I wanted to get down a few thoughts… or maybe one thought… guess we’ll see.

Sunday we pretty much traveled all day, but before we left for an insanely long day of traveling, we went to church.

it was beautiful.  For a lot of reasons.

we showed up on time, 8am, and nobody was there… haha… guess people come late to church even in Haiti.  Really they work on Haitian time, and everybody is at Sunday School.  So we’re standing outside the front door and here comes the line of kids… it’s CRAZY how many kids… CRAZY.

Then before you know it the whole place starts to fill up… i can’t tell you the joy I have, even now, thinking of this community of faith, these people praising God, the same God my church back home was singing about… crazy…

have I mentioned yet in these posts how LOUD they sing?  Man that’s awesome.  I think I’m gonna see if we can make THAT happen this sunday…

The service started with some singing, someone got up and prayed, then, with all the kids in there, each class (age) stood up for the whole church and recited their memory verse.  The whole church celebrating together… old, young, older, and younger… haha… Pretty sure there’s something we can learn from that.

Today the image is still in my mind.  Their smiles.  Their laugh.  The joy they have.

It’s joy that honestly can only come from one place.

I’m leading worship this sunday which is kinda weird to think about… I’m trying to find songs that I can wrap my heart around and express what I’m feeling inside… it’s hard because I guess I’m not sure what I feel inside.  But I guess I do feel that the people showed me, those images I have in my mind, showed me without doubt that REAL LIFE, TRUE LIFE, comes from GOD.

That we screw it up all the time.  Taking joy and pleasure from stuff… when all the time here’s the God of the whole Universe just waiting for us to turn to HIM.  It’s why the scriptures say it’s “hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”  All of us in America are rich, and we’re too distracted by shiny things. These people in Haiti have nothing.  They have no STUFF so as to get confused about where true life comes from.  It’s all God, it’s all they have.

So today, tomorrow, this week, and the rest of my life, I pray I remember their faces… their joy… their life and their hope and how there’s no doubt it comes from God.  TRUE LIFE comes from God and God alone, not from any shiny thing we could possibly get our hands on.

I’ll write more as God let’s me know what to write… may take me a while to process more, but I’m sure I’ll have more to say.

cheers,
j

A few pics I took on my phone this week..

J

Today was crazy… in good and bad ways.

We all finished our projects, so we had a day to rest.  And rest we did.  We actually went about 2 hours away to this club Indego place that used to be one of those all inclusive resort type places.  It was an instant clash of reality.  Actually at the gates to this beach club is poverty.  Honestly.  Right at the gate.  You cross in and enter a different world.  All you can eat buffet, drinks, private beach, pools… kinda like America.

The highlight of the day for me was that we got to pool some resources and pay for Arthur and one of our Haitian friends Jaypee (no idea how to spell that… haha…)  Jaypee had never been that far away from his village and was so incredibly grateful for the experience.  It was awesome to see the two of them just getting space and rest from their lives that are so chaotic and stressful.

It was a wierd day though… all that indulgence, when the day before we where in the middle of a village of extreme poverty.  We looked both eye to eye in the matter of hours… INDULGENCE and POVERTY. The two realities of our world smashed right on top of each other.

You can’t get away really from the terrible way those two things exist in our world.

It felt weird at first for me to think about even going to a beach on a trip like this… but honestly… we’re gonna have to deal with reality NOW or when we land in the US and hop into our nice air conditioned cars and eat whatever we want.  we’re gonna have to deal with it.

At this point I honestly don’t know how to put into words how to process it.  I’m so grateful for the rest and the time to hang with the team.

Bruce, who has been a volunteer around Oakbrook for YEARS, serving behind the scenes, doing ANYTHING that ANYBODY asks decided now was the time to get baptized.  So we did it, all of us, baptized him in the ocean, in Haiti.  God is good.

I don’t know really how to respond to the Poverty.  I can’t really wrap my mind around it.  It still feels kinda like a strange incredibly life like movie.  You’ve just never experienced anything like it.

All i know is what I wrote in the last post, that God has a plan for why I’ve seen what I’ve seen, and felt what I’ve felt.  I know it.  I know HE is bigger than all of this, and that HIS HEART breaks for HIS children in Haiti, and all over the world for that matter.

I can’t love Jesus and not love these people and DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.

can’t wait to have some more space to process and see what God does… I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunity this has been to see the community of faith alive and breathing all over the world.  God is surely doing His thing…

tomorrow we wake up and head to an hour of church (it’s a solid two at the shortest) then we take off for the States… I think it’s gonna be so weird to step off the ground in Haiti into a plane to take us to Miami, with a movie playing and drink cart moving down the aisle…

j

So I’m a little behind… it’s actually day six today, so I’m gonna try and back track a bit and get some thoughts and impressions from day five… then hopefully I can write some from today.

Yesterday was friday, day five.  Again, it’s amazing for me to see how God works through these people that by American standards have nothing.

You can’t even really put it into words.  You see pictures on tv.  You see specials, and people bring back pictures, but it just doesn’t do it justice.  You can’t describe it.  You can’t really tell people about it, you just have to feel it.

A couple things happened yesterday (friday) that rocked me.

First, we went into the village again, this time to go to Kedler’s house.  Kedler is a Haitian kid, who came to visit in the US a few months back in process of trying to get his student ViSA.  I mean, I knew his story was incredible.  I guess I knew.  But you honestly can’t FEEL it, until you stand in the middle of his house and see the dirt floor he sleeps on.  And see his grandma outside cooking something up over a fire, and see the hut of an outhouse in his backyard.  When you stand there, you can feel it.  His story is incredible.  And I can’t wait to see what God does in and through his life… it’s just unbelievable.  In July he’s coming to the US to study computers.  He somehow got educated in the middle of the poorest village in Haiti to the equivalent of high school, passed his GED, got a student visa, and then got into IVY TECH.  He’ll be in Lafayette studying in a month.  To just think of him sleeping in a bed every night in air conditioning, and flushing a toilet every day is just blowing my mind.

The second thing that rocked me was this choir.  Each night this week we’ve been heading down to the church to record the church’s choir.  last night was our last night.  They did four songs… it’s beautiful.  It’s just almost too much to describe to listen to these voices in the middle of this village in this little church singing about how GREAT GOD is.  it’s crazy.

We finish up, and we just say thanks for blessing US… and they say it’s a DREAM of theirs to do this.  One of my new Haitian friends said to me that he hopes they can get these recordings to a radio station because many people need to hear the truth of these songs.

I think that’s all I got.  I can’t describe it.  I can’t even really process it all.

all I know is that God is good.  that HIS ways are perfect.  and that HE never does anything on accident… and I know that God has me here for a reason… I hope that I don’t miss what HE wants to do through me when I get back… God move me to action.

j

Here are some pics from the past few days… I’ll post more later. Most of these where taken by my wife.  If you’ve never experienced something like this… pictures don’t even do it justice….

j

f

I posted the last post before we left for the evening church service.  Every Thursday, the local church here has a church service in one of the villages that are close.  I don’t really have the words to describe it, but i’ll try to get down the highlights.

1. This service is literally a table to set the main song leader or teachers Bible, and then people from the houses around bring out chairs to sit on.  No stage. No building even.  Just in the middle of the village surrounded by people and houses.  It’s noisy, distracting, hard to listen, but people dial in.

2. The service was lead by a 17 year old kid, who we’ve been talking to all week because he sings in the choir.  It was his responsibility to lead through the entirety of the service… setting up each element, then leading through the songs.  He did this ON HIS OWN.  Just made it happen.  Incredible leadership from a young kid.

3. The person who spoke at the service wasn’t even the pastor.  we’ve probably heard about 5 different Haitians give “talks” this week at devotionals and then at the church service.  And they all can PREACH.  It really seems as though ANY Haitian who loves God will get up and preach the gospel… crazy.

4. At the church service a women gave her testimony about her life.  But it wasn’t a testimony that was what we may think… as in, I was like THIS, then God showed up and now it’s like THIS.  It was honestly that she was in the process of it all.  The junk.  her husband is a drunk, she has 9 kids, and she is the one that has to leave to work, earn the money, care for the kids, and then take the abuse of her husband.  She said she didn’t know if she could go on… and while holding her probably 1 year old child she sang… “love god… love god… love god…”

5. After the women gave her testimony, the church rallied around her… as if that’s just what you do.  The song leader said now we are all going to pray for her… and in 50 different Haitian voices- did I mention like 50 people came to the service?- all out loud, they prayed.  LOUD.  It’s was the most beautiful thing I’ve heard.

IT WAS A PICTURE OF THE GOSPEL COMING TO LIFE AND LIVING AND BREATHING THROUGH GODS PEOPLE.

I’m struck by a few things that I’m sure I’ll still have to process along the way…. but mostly I’m feeling the words of Christ more than ever… “it will be hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heavn.”  These people don’t have classes on “community” or set up a “system” of caring.  They just do it.  It’s who they are.  It’s what Christians DO.

After the service the pastor said that in this village there is a women who is sick, so they are going to go pray for her.  Everybody goes.  It’s what they do.  There’s no care ministry.  There’s nobody twisting anybody’s arm.  They do it.

I’m struck by how much leadership there is among the men.  Young kids leading songs and services, five different guys teaching… I work in a church that is MASSIVE compared to Haitian standards, and we have a hard time raising up leaders…. and here we are in the middle of Haiti, and in a church of about a 100, there’s more than enough leadership… because that’s the Gospel.  Because that’s what you do.

I’m in awe of these people.  Their life.  Their love of God.  The way that Christ has taken hold of their life and it’s changed literally everything about their life.  They have new life in Him, and you can see it in the way the act, love each other, care for each other, pray and sing.  OH man can they sing.  I don’t think 1,000 people in our church are as loud as the 50 Haitians in the middle of the village.

well… God is surely stirring me… I’m praying I don’t leave the same and forget what I’ve seen.  But that the power of what God is doing through this community of faith would drive me to action.

now I’m off for another day… God use me.
j

Haiti | day three & four

So I haven’t done the best at writing.  I thought I could figure out a way to blog every night before I went to sleep… not so much.   Our past two days have been crazy busy.  Each morning we wake up and are at devotional by 6:40, we head back, then I’m at the church working by 8.

Today (thursday), we pretty much finished most of our projects.  We’ve replaced the blown tweeters in both of their speakers, repositioned them, built entirely new connection boxes, soldered a TON, and had a TON of great conversation along the way.

It seems like every day we’re in the church, new people, and a few regulars keep coming by.  Reggie has been with us all week.  He’s helping keep an eye on us, and his english is getting really good.  He lives in the village behind us with his brother.  What a great guy.  There’s a few others that keep coming by as we work that are singing in the choir.

We come back for lunch around noon, Rosalor cooks us an authentic Haitian lunch.  Rice, Beans, and today there was a little goat.  I have to say, the food has been spectacular… seriously awesome.  Oh, and the Coke is out of this world.

After lunch, we usually head back to the church, get some more work done, then come back for dinner.  we grab a bite, then a few of us head back to the church to record the choir.  It’s great.  It’s a privilege to record them and listen.  It’s beautiful to hear these songs coming from people that live in this dark place.  There’s no doubt that God is alive and moving in midst of these people.

Today was a little different, instead of heading back to the church, after lunch we took off for a walk into the village next to Double Harvest.  Reggie actually took us to his house, which was a palace compared to most, beautiful carved wood doors, in the center of this village.  We where there for only seconds before we got mobbed by kids from everywhere…

I don’t think I can honestly put into words what I saw today.  I can’t believe the hope and life that I see in the eyes of these people that live in what Americans wouldn’t even consider to put in their back yard as a shed.

I hope that my heart continues to be changed by what I’m experiencing, and I won’t be the same.

I’ll try and write again tomorrow… we’ve only got three days left, which is crazy… feels like we’ve been here forever.

Tomorrow we’re finishing up in the Church, then there’s talk that we may be able to help Kedler paint the room he’s going to use for his internet cafe.  an internet cafe in the middle of a village in Haiti where there’s no internet… incredible.

cheers,

j

I can’t believe it’s only been one day.

I’m actually writing this at 11:30 at night.  The power went off at 9, and I obviously missed the boat writing.  the pace is just different here.  fresh. real. awesome.

This morning we woke up well after the sun had been up for about an hour, and we walked down to the morning devotional.  6:40 on the dot.  It’s surprising for a culture that’s not that concerned with time…  The workers that Double Harvest employs all gather for a morning devotional.  The walk from the apartment to the shelter was hot… the air is thick here, it’s the tropics for sure… We walk up and they’re about ready to begin.  A man picks up an accordion, a song leader gets everybody to stand, and they dive in… and the SING.  LOUD.  no speakers. no projectors. no lights.  just people singing.

After the two songs, one of the Haitian pastors gets up to talk.  He really is great a communicator.  Arthur, the missionary, attempts to translate for us, but the dialect is so quick it’s hard for him to keep up.  But from what we could make out, he spoke on honoring your parents.  Sounds kinda silly.  But understanding scripture, like life, is all about context.  I’ll never forget these words… “children that honor their parents, and respect their parents, respect other people.”  Shocking truth for a country that men don’t respect anything.  Shocking truth for a country where people get old, and they loose control of their bladders, so instead of cleanning up after the elderly, Haitians will stop feeding them, so they don’t have to clean up after them.

I’d say a little dose of Godly respect for your elders could have the power to change a nation.  God’s word is unchanging and true… for EVERY nation under the sun.

the rest of the day, a few of us spent helping fix cables, connections, the sound system, the video system and more at the church.  we worked with people that I already feel are great friends.

Maybe the craziest thing about my day was the contrast in hope.

Last night we drive through maybe one of the darkest scenes I’ve ever seen in real life.  And I’m talking “dark” in every sense of the word.

But here at Double Harvest it’s different.

The life and hope we see in the eyes of people here at Double harvest can only be God.

It’s incredible.

God is life and hope.  I’ve never felt that to be more true than here.

I can’t wait to see what God does tomorrow…

I’m gonna sleep like a rock.

cheers,

j