Prayer
Seeing into the Future
Kami L. Rice
We arrived in the dark after driving for hours over imperfect roads, so I couldn’t see until morning the desolate place where I had arrived. The ground was dry and cracked, with little vegetation beyond scrubby, determined hints of green.
My Haitian hosts were the people of Lemuel Ministries who work in Gran Dyab, which translates “Big Devil” and is also called the Plateau. It is located near the town of Anse Rouge on the northern edge of the backward C that curves into Haiti’s western border with the Atlantic Ocean. The physical desolation of this place mirrors its spiritual desolation.
Manis Dilus, who founded Lemuel Ministries, is from the area and knows its poverty firsthand. In Gran Dyab, the sun and the lack of rain burn up attempts to plant small gardens for food. People pray to the spirits instead of to God. Lemuel Ministries is working for the rebirth of both the land and its people.
Manis’ grandfather, who sold Manis the land where Lemuel is located, was a witch doctor; and, like most people in the Plateau, many of Manis’ family members are voodooists. Manis’ parents, however, became Christians; and he was raised in a Christian home. He started Lemuel Ministries in 1996 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital. Two years later, he felt God calling him to expand its focus to include the Plateau.
The vision of Lemuel Ministries looks forward two generations, recognizing that long-lasting changes in culture and environment don’t come quickly. Manis tells people that though he doesn’t expect to be alive to see it, he pictures Gran Dyab with springs of water coming from dry ground once covered with thorns and thistles. He pictures springs of life coming from dry souls because God is worshipped on the Plateau.
Manis and his wife Judy, who grew up a missionary kid in Haiti, are focusing on young people, teaching them a biblical mind-set and a desire for strong nuclear families. Their hope is that the next generation of children, born to today’s young people, will grow up in Christian homes and be well-equipped to make good choices, to take care of the land, to be educated, to choose their husbands and wives wisely. The generation after that, the grandchildren of the people Lemuel is working with today, will be the ones to change Haiti.
The folks at Lemuel Ministries are also praying and working to see God’s restoration of the Plateau’s parched land. Judy explained that people in Gran Dyab used to grow lots of food; but in order to cook the food, they cut down trees to make charcoal. New trees weren’t planted, and eventually almost all the trees were gone. That’s when weather patterns began to change; the rain stopped.
Perhaps you’ve seen a diagram of the water cycle. I didn’t pay a lot of attention when I studied it in school; but when I visited the Plateau, I learned how important the water cycle is. If a piece of the cycle is removed, the cycle is disrupted.
Trees are important because their deep roots draw water from the water table below the ground’s surface. Then water re-enters the atmosphere as it evaporates from their leaves and stems. If the trees are gone, the water doesn’t re-enter the cycle in the same way.
Lemuel is working to reintroduce trees to the water cycle by planting and nurturing trees that will help bring back the rain. Trees take a lot of water, and Manis and other young men work hard hauling water from the well to the trees.
The people at Lemuel Ministries also pray for rain. When Manis came back to the Plateau, the people told him he shouldn’t come there because the place was a throne to Satan. They said that God had abandoned them. Manis disagreed, saying that they had abandoned God. To prove his point, he asked them how they prayed for rain; and the people admitted that they pray to the spirits.
When Manis held the first prayer meeting for rain, only three people attended. Afterward, the rain came. Ginger Muchmore, Judy’s mother and a founding partner of Lemuel, said that for a year, every time the Lemuel Ministries pickup truck came over the hill toward the Plateau property, it rained again. The Plateau church is still small but has grown to about eighty people, as God breaks through the stronghold of false beliefs. “It’s sad the way Satan keeps these people enslaved. It’s all based in fear,” Judy explains. “They’re so in fear of what Satan can do to them.”
“In America we’re often so focused on quantity and on immediate results that quality is lost and immediate results prove temporary,” says Judy, echoing Manis’ idea that it will take generations for the Plateau and its people to flourish. “We’ve accepted that we won’t see the results.” Judy, Manis, Ginger, and the rest of the Lemuel family are willing to forgo quick pay-offs in exchange for lasting change.
Yet some changes are already evident. The people of the Plateau are building a church. The health in the area has improved with medical clinics, run by visiting doctors, and with people’s access to pure, clean water from Lemuel’s well. Education is improving now that Lemuel has started a Christian elementary school for the Plateau’s children so that they don’t have to walk miles to the nearest town. Lemuel Ministries and the people of the Plateau also worked with Mission Aviation Fellowship to build an airstrip that allows people and supplies to be transported to the Plateau.
The week of my visit was exciting because camp was about to begin. One hundred kids from Lemuel’s programs in Port-au-Prince were coming to rural Haiti to join one hundred Plateau kids for a week of camp. Among the camp leaders were young adults who had previously come as campers and had matured enough to become leaders this year.
The city kids were hosted in homes around Lemuel’s property, so everyone in the area was preparing for camp by putting a new coat of plaster on the walls of their small homes. Even a new coat of plaster represents the new life and freedom that is coming to the Plateau through God’s restorative work.
Dig Deeper
Read Isaiah 41:17–20 and Revelation 7:15–17. Pray for the people of Lemuel Ministries, who believe in the restorative power of God and are bringing God’s hope to the land and the people of Gran Dyab. Pray also for other people or places or parts of your own life that yearn to experience God’s gifts of restoration and abundant life.
Kami Rice (www.kamirice.com) is a freelance writer, based in Nashville, who loves learning and telling stories of God’s work around the world.
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