Someone’s gift encouraged me

I think it was Mother’s Day after church that someone I know well came up to me and told me that they had something from God to tell me. I haven’t always had the best experiences with this sort of thing, but I knew this person well and knew they loved God and loved Vanessa and I. The woman proceeded to tell me that she saw a storm coming, uh-oh, but that it would be alright. In fact, she said it was going to be good, better than alright. Well, I’ve remembered that word as I’ve dealt with different things, some personal, some church related. My point is that God thought enough about me to speak to someone who would speak into my life. It reminds me that God loves me and knows where I am in life. It also gives me hope that God is moving and all things are working for my good in Christ. I Cor. 12:7 says, “A spiritual gift is given to each of us so we can help each other.” As we step deeper into this series on “Others” my desire is that the Holy Spirit will move in our lives in a new way so that we can help each other.

When It’s Fair To Compare

One of the biggest challenges that I face as a Christian, father, and pastor is in the area of comparing myself to others. It’s always been easy to look across at another person and see how I’m doing according to them. The trouble with that is that we either end up prideful or jealous. Think you’re doing better and you could be prideful. Think someone is doing better than you and jealousy and envy rear their ugly heads. That’s why Paul cautioned us in 2 Cor. 10:12, “But they are only comparing themselves with each other, using themselves as the standard of measurement. How ignorant!”
Instead, the Psalms encourages us in this comparison; “Psalm 119:6 (NLT) Then I will not be ashamedwhen I compare my life with your commands.” We ought to compare ourselves to God’s commands. It’s like a mirror that we can look into to see how we are doing. Everyone wants to know how he or she is doing, that’s natural. Measuring ourselves by the wrong standard is dangerous, but comparing ourselves to God’s commands will help us to grow and develop without the damaging attitudes that go along with comparing ourselves to others.

The Pastor living on a dirt floor

On the Friday night after we had gotten into the Dom. Rep. we were scheduled to minister at this little church. It was a Friday night, not a normal church night yet the church was packed. It was in a typical neighborhood with a little bar down the street. The first year interns did a good job of sharing their faith and we got to minister to people which is always a thrill. My heart was touched by this pastor pictured with his wife. He and his wife live in a small room behind the church. You can see that church is just a stick structure with corrugated tin around the outside and nothing inside. In fact, a recent missions group tore down the structure and built this tin building. This pastor has a job working on a road construction crew, and pastors after work and on weekends. He and his wife also take in abandoned children and raise them in their home. The real shocker came when we were invited back to the pastor’s quarters and saw that he and his wife lived on a dirt floor with a portion of the room partitioned by a sheet for their bathroom. You will be happy to know that HOF is concreting their floor and building them a new bathroom. That is the best $500 we have ever spent.

Elvis, Tony, and Niko

While in the Dominican Republic we met three incredible men. Bishop Elvis is the overseer of the Church of God churches in all of the Dominican Rep. Tony is an evangelist who has a children’s ministry to the poorest parts of his city and also helps out people like us on mission’s trips. Niko is a Haitian who oversees the Haitian Churches of God. He started with 8 churches but it has grown to 43 and we are working with him to build a couple of churches this year. All these men co-labor with Charles Lambert who does all this as a labor of love for Central and South America. We were privileged to get to spend some time with these men and hear their hearts for God.

The Dominican Cont’d

On Sunday morning we attended a Haitian Church that spoke Creole French. Several of the interns spoke that morning, sharing how God has changed their lives. The worship was great even though I couldn’t understand any songs and I sensed the presence of the Holy Spirit there. They were such joyful and passionate people as they worshipped. The building as you can see was little more than a shack by American standards but you could tell that they had a spirit of excellence, which is the Holy Spirit, in everything that they did. I was amazed at how well behaved the children were and how nice the building was kept, everything painted and in place. I felt impressed that we, HOF, should invest in that church and so we have sent them money to buy land and build a building. It brings so much joy when we can be a blessing to others, and can’t wait to hear of them dedicating a new place to the Lord. We are so blessed here in the USA and I feel compelled to be a blessing to other people. I don’t believe there is a better way to invest money than in building churches that will impact their community. I want to bring back one of you Cajuns and have you talk French to that church some day.

We Are Back

Many of you know that I’ve been in the Domincan Republic with our first year interns on their mission trip/church dedication. The 1st year interns last year preached at a church and they came back so fired up that we decided to build them a new church as the place they were meeting needed an update. I’ll be blogging about our trip for the next several days and showing you some of the pics we took. I’ll include some funny ones of the interns as well as some of the ministry ones. I’ll also be talking about what God talked to me about. It’s awesome to get outside of your normal box and see that God is a big God. I love to see other parts of the world, a desire given by my father’s love of missions. He set a great example traveling behind the Iron Curtain and always having a heart for peoples in other cultures having the opportunity to know Christ. Jesus was into missions, He left Heaven to come to earth so we could know. Think about it.