“I want to be her when I grow up,” Brooke tells me as she comes in with tears in her eyes after spending time getting to know Pastor Fransisco’s wife Esther.

It’s not hard to come to the same conclusion after a simple five minutes in the presence of this woman who just oozes Christ, who encourages and challenges my faith more in one conversation than any service I can remember this past month.

Esther has been hard to get a hold of on the phone the past few weeks. We found out why today as she came to visit after hearing we had been trying to get a hold of her.

She has left her house in Port-au-Prince, comfortable and with the children she loves in the care of her mother, to sleep in Canaan and do life with the people of the community. “To see their lives, Stephanie, to live with them and know what the days are like for them. Canaan is so hard,” she tells me with a fiery passion that brings tears to her eyes that she apologizes for.

She can’t help it. She tears up whenever she talks about this community. “They are my heart, Stephanie. They are my heart, I have a love for them that God has given me and I don’t have words for it.”

It broke her heart to simply leave Canaan just to visit us today, although she loves visiting and is passionate as he talks to us. She uses the word herself – passion. Like God’s love for us, I see Esther burning with His spirit as she tells me, “I am passionate for them.”

She tells me stories, so many packed into such a little time that was supposed to just be saying hello. Dreams that God has sent coming to life as she rushes babies dying of malnutrition to the hospital and has to give her own breastmilk, changing the mentality and the thinking of people for long term change in the youth and future of Canaan and all of it’s people. Being sick for weeks and then healed as soon as she moved into Canaan and started sleeping in the church. God providing in the impossible, bathing and doing the hair of the wife of a church elder who has gone “crazy” & saying it with not one hint of disgust or pride, but instead a love for this wife and calling the devoted husband a “hero.” “These are what has given me this passion for them. These experiences. They are not in my heart – they are my heart,” said Esther.

This is God moving in Haiti, friends.

As we finish talking, asking the question, “Who are we that God would use us?” Esther picks up a rock.

“You see this rock? This is us.” She throws it.

“That rock did not move itself – people can talk about what it has done or what it is doing, but it did not throw itself! God moved it! The rock cannot do a thing to throw itself!”

I wish you could sit with Esther and assure her as I did that she does not need to apologize for the tears that represent her passion for the people she loves. As you read instead, could you pray with us for our pastors, their wives, and their ministries? There is so much that they are doing as God “throws His rocks”.