Foreign

In my hand, I have a pitit, wonn gourd. It’s pretty important. Do you want it? No? But come on, it’s the most important thing you will ever receive in your lifetime! Wait, you don’t understand what it is? Come on, I already told you. It’s pitit, it’s wonn. Let’s see, it’s jaun. It’s a gourd. It’s priceless; literally the most important thing in your whole life if you accept it. Just accept it!

This is how I imagine the Gospel to sound to the children of Haiti. Full of words like grace, love, mercy, and forgiveness that they have never heard of, much less experienced. Yet still we come to Haiti with the Gospel message, with the big words, with our trainings on the four spiritual laws and all our fancy Gospel sharing tools. We march in knowing we only have one week to make an eternal difference. We share the best news that we’ve ever been given with the people of a foreign country and encourage them to accept it during our time in their country. But have we ever stopped to think about how foreign some of the concepts we are preaching actually are? For the child who gets beat because they lose 5 gourds (the equivalent of about 9 cents), can they truly understand the concepts of grace and forgiveness? Can a woman with five children from five men understand what unconditional love means? It’s hard enough for me, a middle class American citizen from a loving, Christian home to completely understand such huge concepts. I have experienced grace, forgiveness, mercy and unconditional love from my amazing parents, from my youth leaders, and from my best friend on a near daily basis.

It’s like me telling you to accept the small, round, yellow coin that I was offering you at the beginning of this post. You had no idea what the words I was using meant! You just knew that I thought it was important, but did this make the object I was trying to hand to you any more important or valuable in your mind? Most likely not. You might have just accepted it to please me, because I thought it was so valuable.

I guess what I’m trying to do in this blog post is to help everyone understand my role as a long term missionary. I’ve been in Haiti for 3 months and I have not verbally shared the Gospel once. I realized this a few weeks ago and was deeply upset. What was I doing here if not presenting the Gospel?? Wasn’t that what missionaries were supposed to do? Go out every day and share the most amazing news to anyone and everyone who would listen?  Over the course of my worrying and apologizing to God for failing as a missionary, I felt like God was smiling and chuckling at me. Not in a mean way of course, but in the way a parent might when their child is fretting over something unnecessarily. I stopped and tried to figure out why God might be doing that. Then it hit me! I HAVE been sharing the Gospel every day. I share it in my classroom when I hug every student as they enter. I share it when I give students an extra chance to turn in late homework. I share it when a child is on my last nerves and I don’t hit them like they’re expecting because that’s what every other teacher has done. How can I expect my children to understand the concept of unconditional love from God when they have never experienced unconditional love from a human? Being at the orphanage, they do receive love and hugs and kisses, but with two people in charge of 35 children, they don’t receive as much as they need. It’s not the fault of the house parents, who do their absolute very best, but the fault of the situation in Haiti. My job here is to love these kids, to teach them to forgive someone who stole their crayon, to apologize and repent for bad deeds and to help them experience some of the foreign concepts of the Gospel message so that when the short term teams come and share that important message they can truly understand.

If gave you the small, round, yellow coin I was describing to you, how much more likely would you be to accept it?

"Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men.... You are serving the Lord Christ." ~ Colossians 3:23-24