jmccann@heraldsun.com; 419-6601
DURHAM — Emotional aftershocks from this week’s earth-altering quake in Haiti are running deep among the faithful at Aldersgate United Methodist Church, and on Thursday night tears poured out as mourners wept for the dead and the terrible ordeal ahead for survivors in the impoverished country where many thousands lost their lives to the natural disaster.
The church on Umstead Road located off northern Durham’s Guess Road wasn’t full, but the spirit was high as congregants called aloud in prayer the names of Haitians printed on slips of paper. Some clutched their prayer prompts and headed to the front of the church to kneel at the altar and cry out to God.
“They are real people,” vigil organizer April Perry said. “People that we know and love.
“People we are personally acquainted with,” she said.
People like Boslo St. Revel, who interpreted for Durham’s Sheila Rittgers when she’d minister in Haiti. He aspired to be an accountant, Rittgers said.
But St. Revel was killed in the quake.
Those at Aldersgate praised the Lord for his soul. And Rittgers, fighting emotions, suggested that praise is what is required at this hour, because that’s what the Haitian people are.
“[T]hese are the Haitian people that I know,” Rittgers said. They have a hope that is not of this world, she explained.
“We believe in the almighty God,” Aldersgate pastor Doug Lain said. “We come to get in touch with that higher power.”
Scripture was read that referenced a time in the Bible when the wall of Jerusalem was broken down, and those in the pews heard a portion of the Bible about the need to forgo blaming victims in exchange of practicing the true religion of helping the hungry and those otherwise hurting.
Regarding the earthquake, Aldersgate associate pastor Al Hocutt said someone might ask, “What does that have to do with me so far away in Haiti?”
He explained that God sheds his grace on mankind, and that grace is to be extended to others, “even to though we may not know them by name, but because they are our brothers and sisters.”
Hocutt prayed: “Let our hope be as strong as their hope. Let our faith be as strong as their faith.”
“I pray for calm and honest leadership…” a woman petitioned, “as Haiti knits itself back together.”
“Lord you are the living water,” another woman prayed as she asked God to provide drinking water to the people of Haiti.
Perry, a full-time nurse practitioner at Duke HomeCare & Hospice, years ago went on a medical missions trip to Haiti. So moved by what she saw, she returned to Durham and eventually started Luke’s Mission Inc., a Christian outreach promoting public-health initiatives in Haiti. There’s no grand edifice for her nonprofit organization but instead something she runs out of her home, something she feels particularly called to do.
