This blog was written by my good friend Matt Rittman. He is a student at Purdue University and is the president of his fraternity. He and three of his friends joined us last week at Mission of Hope here in Haiti. This is his story of how the Lord pursued him throughout his time here. We now share more than just the same name, (Matthew Robert isn’t as unique as I thought) we will also share eternity.
I had quite the journey to faith. And by faith, I mean the real kind; the kind where you have no doubt that Jesus died on the cross and rose again for your sins. My journey didn’t start in Haiti, but it wasn’t until halfway through my trip that I finally broke free from the chains that were preventing its finish. Bear with me, because this isn’t an ordinary recollection of stories from a mission trip. It’s the story of a lifelong skeptic coming to faith in a third-world country thanks to incredible friends, inspiring missionaries, and most importantly, a faithful God who met me right where I was.
For a long time, I thought the Christian faith a reasonable explanation for a lot of inexplicable universal truths. I always had a hard time believing that the universe merely happened by coincidence. I found evolution, at least on its own, a poor explanation for the vastness of the mind and man’s capacity for love. I didn’t deem science a reasonable explanation for steadfast moral principles or the power of the human conscience. So, I was always curious about Christianity. Even so, too many questions remained unanswered. Every time I tried to take the first step, I found myself holding onto something that just didn’t quite make sense. There seemed to be overwhelming evidence for widespread evolution. The world seemed too cruel to have been created by a loving God. Christians seemed too quick to judge and too quick to cross the neighbors their religion tells them to love whole-heartedly, and this judgement and malicious behavior too often seemed to be perpetuated by the church. And so, for a long time, I found myself on the fence. I wanted to believe, but I couldn’t get past the undeniable flaws in the Christian faith. And before I went to college, I never faced any real adversity. I didn’t think I needed God to make me happy. It was much simpler to stick to what had been the norm in my life for 18 years.
Then, I went to college, and I experienced the first bit of turbulence in my young life. I had always been a tightly wound kid. I was academically driven, and I filled my free time with sports. I never got caught up in the quest for popularity that causes problems for so many high schoolers. But in my first year away from home, I went a little crazy. I was still focused academically, but I broke up with the girl of my dreams so I could spend my free time drinking, chasing girls, and the like. This phase of my life culminated when I encountered a run-in with the law, and I realized that this lifestyle wasn’t going to lead to the fulfillment I craved. I became determined to reconcile my freshman year. I went back to the girl I so foolishly pushed out of my life nine months before, and I rewound myself into the straight-laced kid that I knew from the first 18 years of my life. This turnaround went better than I could’ve imagined. In my sophomore year, everything clicked. I became a leader in my fraternity and on my campus. I got an internship, and that was supposed to be the first step to realizing the career success that was bound to fulfill me. There wasn’t much time for fun, but that didn’t matter so long as I was ‘successful’. This went well for a while, but I became so consumed with the things that I was achieving that I didn’t have time to maintain relationships. I pushed away friends, and again lost the girl of my dreams. I hit my rock bottom in Kalamazoo, Michigan, hundreds of miles from any friends or family, and I didn’t know what else to turn to. All this led me to my first serious exploration of Christianity.
Years before, my girlfriend, a devout Christian, had given me a copy of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, and it seemed a reasonable place to start my walk of faith. I gave it a read, and I was, more or less, rationally convinced of Christianity. In my head, I accepted Christ, and things started to turn around. I began to repair the important relationships in my life. I felt like I had a grip on everything, and all was well. But the foundation of my faith was based entirely on sound reason, and that wasn’t enough. As C.S. Lewis wrote, “Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.” My mood changed as my life got better, and without fully realizing it, I again turned away from Christianity. But at the end of junior year, my best friend talked me into joining him on a mission trip. And so, for reasons that I didn’t quite understand, I decided to spend the first week of summer break with three friends in Haiti.
When I agreed to go on the trip, I expected to use my youth and energy to build things that would make a difference in the physical lives of the Haitian people. I knew they were impoverished, and I thought the best way to make a difference would be to build houses or distribute food and clothing and other basic human necessities. Turns out, none of these things were in the cards, but I’ll get to that in a minute. We arrived in Haiti on Saturday, and the first surprise of the trip came when I met participants in this absurd thing called the World Race. Evangelizing for 11 months in 11 countries? Right away, I thought they were a little off. Then, they went full lunatic. They told me God talks to them, and they wouldn’t stop talking about some strange thing they call “listening prayer”. Supposedly, if you ask God a question and you sit in silence long enough, he’ll answer. Crazy, right? I was sure these answered prayers were mere figments of their imaginations, and I pretty much thought they belonged in an insane asylum. But, not wanting to hurt their feelings, I reluctantly accepted an invitation to join them on Sunday night. We sat in a circle on the dusty basketball court at Mission of Hope’s facility, closed our eyes, asked God if he had anything to tell us, and into my head popped the image of… wait for it… an ear. God really wanted to tell me something about an ear? Doubtful. Sure enough, they were crazy, and I began to have serious doubts about this whole Christianity thing. But hold onto that image, because it’s important later in this story.
On Monday, we made our first real trek into a village. There, I realized that I was going to spend my week with these peculiar World Racers preaching some religion I wasn’t even sure I believed to a nation whose physical needs were apparent and immediate. We’d walk into villages empty-handed and offer nothing but our prayers to starving villagers. I began to wonder how these Christians could be so cruel as to ignore the obvious brokenness of the Haitians, and I wanted nothing more than to go home.
These feelings perpetuated into Tuesday, and that night, I opened up to my friends about the doubt and confusion that was festering in my mind. Naturally, my friends prayed for me. They prayed that my heart would be opened and that God would reveal himself to me. As you might have guessed, I wasn’t a big believer in the power of prayer, but when they prayed, I felt a jolt inside me. A jolt so powerful it almost moved me to tears. I attributed it to emotion from our first couple days in the village, thought nothing of it, and moved on. But then, things got interesting. I began to experience a series of phenomena that, on their own, could be chalked up to mere coincidence, but altogether were nothing short of astounding.
The first of these phenomena came Wednesday morning. It sounds strange, but bear with me. Earlier in the week, we read a devotional about Jesus washing his disciples’ feet hours before the crucifixion. Right before our small group discussed the passage, one of my friends made a comment about how unpalatable my feet looked. The toenails on each of my big toes had been disfigured from playing soccer barefoot earlier in the week, and I couldn’t help but concede that they needed some maintenance. On Wednesday morning, I woke up and these disfigured toenails were back to normal, looking almost as though they had been freshly clipped. I was amused, but I assumed I just kicked something and knocked them off in my sleep. I shrugged it off and got ready for another day. Then, we went out into a village. I was mentally prepared for another rough day, but for some reason, things were different. I felt compelled to take a more active role in our discussions with villagers, and I actually enjoyed our morning session of evangelism. After lunch, we went to worship with the village pastor. But before our worship session, one of the Racers called me over. She heard that I was having some ear pains (told you that listening prayer would resurface), and she offered to pray for healing. I laughed, thinking I needed medicine, not prayer, but figured it couldn’t hurt. So, she did her thing, and sure enough, the pain subsided. Not completely, but significantly. We went on to have an incredible session of worship, and then we stumbled across the most beautiful view of the gulf and the Haitian mountains. My new friend Matt somehow knew I’d never been baptized, and he said “that’d be a pretty unbelievable spot” motioning to the beach below. It made me a bit uncomfortable, as I still had some lingering doubts, so I made an excuse as to why it couldn’t happen on my trip. Still, despite the confusion in my head, I felt something on Wednesday that I knew was the Holy Spirit. I felt it in the village, I felt it while we worshipped, and I felt it during our small group discussion that night. I’d never felt Jesus working through me like that before, and it was remarkable.
When I came back to my room that night, I was alone, and I spent some time reflecting on the day. I thought of the verse Matt had been reciting all week. “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” For nine months, I had been confessing with my mouth. I said I believed in Jesus, and I thought that was enough. But I was missing the other, more important half. Right then and there, alone in a dirty, bug-infested room, I accepted Jesus into my heart, and I felt liberation wash over my soul. While this new beginning of sorts might seem a suitable end to the story, the Lord was far from done.
Before falling asleep that night, I flipped through Mere Christianity looking for something on the creation story. I stopped at a passage discussing God’s infinite nature and the fact that no matter what we believe, we must accept that something was always there. More or less, C.S. Lewis was telling us that although our minds can’t necessarily comprehend things of infinite nature, God has been there from the beginning. It was an intellectually stimulating passage, but not necessarily noteworthy at the time. Then, before falling asleep, I asked God to tell me if I was supposed to be baptized in Haiti. Another seemingly inconsequential event, but these things will come to significance in a minute.
I never remember dreams. Honestly, I couldn’t tell you the last dream I remembered. That is, until I woke up on Thursday morning. I remembered, in vivid detail, the dream I had the night before. I remembered it for five whole minutes! Despite forgetting relatively quickly, the message was clear. I wasn’t supposed to be baptized in Haiti. Baptism is meant to be a public declaration of your faith, and I needed to save that so those in my life who haven’t yet come to Christ could see it. Not only did this mark my first ever spiritual dream, it was another answered prayer. Then, I went down to breakfast, and one of my friends, completely out of the blue, asked if I had a spiritual dream the night before. The dream was crazy enough on its own, but to mark its significance, God told a friend, too. I was taken aback. Then, I told Matt about the dream, and he brushed it off because God had already made it clear to him that baptism wasn’t in the cards for me that week. All this happened before I even sat down for breakfast. And on top of that, the ear pain I was experiencing on Tuesday and Wednesday was totally gone. Quite the way to start a day, if you ask me.
Like the rest of the week, we spent Thursday in the village. At the start, it was pretty ordinary. But then, we stumbled across two young men, probably about 16, and we told them why we were talking to them. Upon hearing this, one of them paused and said something in Creole to our interpreter. Our interpreter turned, looked at us, and said “He’s asking who invented God.” Sure enough, our whole group looked to me for the answer, and I went about quoting the passage I had read the night before. Eventually, both young men accepted Jesus, thanks in large part to a passage I had randomly stumbled upon the night before. I had the opportunity to lead a young man in a salvation prayer not but 12 hours after I had truly accepted Jesus into my own heart. At this point, I thought there were only two logical explanations for this strange series of events. One, I was in the middle of some reality TV prank, or two, God was frantically pursuing me. The latter seemed much more likely.
Later that day, I made a new friend, an 8-year-old Haitian named Mikanson. He was wearing a Mickey Mouse shirt and the biggest smile I’ve ever seen. He spent the morning climbing all over me and following us wherever we went. I met more than my fair share of Haitian kids throughout the week, but for some reason, I felt drawn to this one. When we left for lunch, I could see the heartbreak on his face. We had ‘Kids’ Club’ in the afternoon and we were headed to a different village on Friday, so I didn’t think I’d see him again. I was wrong. As we started set up for Kids’ Club later that afternoon, Mikanson ran up and jumped into my arms. As I held him, another little boy named Isaac walked up and became enamored with my water bottle. Over and over again, he tried to take it out of my hands. I could tell he was thirsty, and it was heart-wrenching to attempt to explain through the language barrier that I couldn’t share, not because I didn’t want to, but because it was against the rules. I found consolation in the fact that we were serving juice later in the afternoon. But, when Isaac got his juice, he sucked it down in the blink of an eye. I knew he needed more, so I began searching for extra juice boxes. Unfortunately, I was too slow, and all the extras were gone before I could get my hands on one. Disheartened, I turned around to find Mikanson. I saw him sitting with Isaac in the back of the room, and I watched him open his juice, take a sip, and give the rest of it to Isaac. This display of compassion and generosity, from an eight-year-old kid, mind you, moved me to tears, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Mikanson was the one to share. It was the sixth ‘God moment’ in three days, and the most powerful of all the signs that God was with me that week.
Believe me, there’s more. I could write a book, but I think I’ve captured the highlights. The moral of my story is this: there will always be unanswered questions, but with Christianity, as with anything, if you choose to ignore the answers in front of you and focus only on the questions that remain, you’ll never find the truth you seek. Before I went to Haiti, I sought an explanation for everything, and I didn’t realize that if every question could be answered, this whole thing would be far too easy to be rewarding in the way that God intended. Martin Luther King Jr. said “Faith is taking the first step, even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” You see, God didn’t intend to make the whole staircase visible. He reveals his ways step by step, and if you spend your life trying to see subsequent steps before you take the first, you’ll never make it upstairs. In a sense, your walk with God is just like any other relationship in your life. When you met your significant other or your best friend, did you try to answer every question about them before you let them into your life? Probably not. In the same sense, if you try to answer every question God has left open for humanity before you accept him, you’ll miss out on the most important relationship of your life. That is why faith is so important. Psalm 34: 8 says “Open your mouth and taste, open your eyes and see how good God is. Blessed are you who run to him.” He’s working in the world around you, constantly sending signs. You can brush them off as coincidences, or you can accept them for what they really are and run to Him.
God is the great author and his story is the world. But how can you hope to understand any story unless you start from the first chapter? Chapter one is faith. God, in all His faithfulness, showed me that in Haiti, and I can’t wait to see what comes in next.
Back (L-R): Errol, Matt C, Adrian, Matt R
Front (L-R): J.T., Q, Seth
