Jesus With Skin On

Monday through Friday, we spent our “mornings” (7:30-3:00, Haitian time) riding in our friend the bus to get the hour and a half/two hours to Fond Chaval, partnering with translators and Sunday school teachers to run a VBS, and then riding back. Some days we got there at 9:00. Some days we got there at 11:00. Every single day there was a crowd of kids waiting for us.

Monday morning, with some of our team still reeling from the wet run VBS on Saturday, was one of those 11:00 days. We pulled into the church to hear the kids already inside, singing away, even singing an English song just for us.

We were a relatively loud team, in a relatively loud country, but Monday morning was one of the calmest, most peaceful, settings that I have ever seen for a VBS. There was a bloody knee and a ripped skirt, but the difference between our leaving moments in Thoman and our leaving moments in Fond Chaval were night and day.
In Fond Chaval, we had the awesome privilege of working with the pastor of the church to figure out how to best make our VBS plans fit into his goals for his church and his children’s discipleship ministry. It wasn’t always perfect. There were moments of miscommunication and times when the high school “small group” leads would turn around and realize that only three of their forty children had actually followed them around the corner. But there were also moments that were very, very good.  

Being the “coach” (the person overall in charge of rotation timing and making sure that things run as smoothly as possible) meant that I got to wander around constantly and see a lot of moments as they happened. And, let me tell you, these high schoolers made a lot of moments happen.
*Rotations were completely dependent on the length of the craft, so the length differed drastically from day to day. We also were operating without watches, which meant that “three minutes” from Jessica could mean just about anything. The teams did an AMAZING job, despite all of that. And, the craft team were heroes, working every day inside of a hot – some days very musically loud – building. They rocked it.*
On Tuesday (?), I walked around the corner of the church to the front games station. Last time I had been there, they had been finished with their planned game and trying to come up with something to fill the rest of the time (common occurrence). This time, though, one of the teenagers stops me before I can tell them to rotate with, “Wait! You have to see this! This is brilliant!”

He squats down on a rocky, dusty field, across from a line of squatting children, and, at his call of, “Ale!” (“go!”), they all start bouncing towards him like an oversized frog race. Within seconds, he is on the ground, eyes sparkling, covered in children who are grinning at him like their favorite uncle has come to town.

This is Jesus with skin on.
Early in the week, one of the teenagers told me he was “frustrated”  with not being able to understand the kids or be understood by them. (Jessica’s favorite question for the week was, “How are you doing?” The great thing about teenagers is that they’re fairly likely to give you an honest answer.) Literally, he was oozing with the longing to just communicate.

The next thing I knew, he had learned the words for “red” and “green” and had forty laughing kids running at him, playing Red Light Green Light.

By Friday, just about every kid there knew his name.

This is Jesus with skin on.
Every time that I would turn around, there was a blanc bent down, listening as hard as they could while a kid whispered in their ear. When I would come up and ask, they would point to individual faces and tell me names that twisted up their tongues just trying to repeat, and each kid would look up and grin.

In the bus, on the way home, they would talk about who was and wasn’t there that day. Because, even though the small groups were different every morning, they paid attention and kept track of “their kids.”

This is Jesus with skin on.
By half way through the week, our team was drooping with exhaustion, but they walked into that church every day already smiling, clapping, dancing and “singing” along with whatever songs our amazing music translators decided to use. They slid into rows with kids or into their place in front to lead songs and poured every bit of energy that they shouldn’t have had into words and motions (that, for the large part, we still don’t understand!).

They kept it up for hours and then melted onto the edge of the stage when the last of the kids had filed out the door, suddenly remembering that they were tired and sick and emotionally wrung out.

This is Jesus with skin on.

One of the girls stayed back with a lady leader on Monday morning, because she had been our throwing up child the night before. Instead of moping about staying behind or doing what she might have wanted to do, she (they) spent the morning repairing eighty gallon bags of too-soft pay dough and then met us at the bus, ready and eager to hear all of our stories.

They smiled and laughed and didn’t complain about missing it. They let their eyes light up with our excitement and let themselves be infused with our desire to have them meet these amazing kids.

They served us without expecting thanks.

This is Jesus with skin on.
   
200 kids smiled at us and laughed with (and at) us as we attempted to speak Creole. They held our hands and sat on our laps. They crowed around us to see the pictures that we had taken, and they made sure that all of the little ones and the shy ones got pictures too. They waved and shouted and ran after the bus as we left every day. They tugged on our arms and called our names. They taught us new words and they greeted us with hugs and music.

Because, every single one of these kids was Jesus with skin on to us.