About Me

TAKEN FROM MY APPLICATION TO ORAL ROBERTS UNIVERSITY.

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,

and before you were born I consecrated you;

I appointed you a prophet to the nations.”

–Jeremiah 1:5

I was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in February of 1986.  It was a time of significant political upheaval, even for Haiti.  My father, though not a political figure, was a common target of political persecution because of his commitment to speaking against all forms of injustice. Furthermore, he has always had a sizeable audience within the protestant church of Haiti that was always ready to listen to him.  This persecution reached one of its highest peaks in the years surrounding my birth.  Our family went into hiding several times during those years in response to direct threats on our lives.  The decision to leave Haiti came when it became known that my older siblings were being stalked to and from school by men whom my parents concluded were kidnappers.  Thus, when I was hardly two years old, God opened inconceivable doors for us, making a way for us to come to the United States.

We could have never imagined the place where God planted us.  To call the town of Chilo, Ohio “small” would be an understatement.  With a population just over 100 people, this rural, white town became the ideal home for a Haitian immigrant family.  To this day, I cannot understand how any immigrant could ever find the town, but as usual, from the consistently wise perspective of hindsight, the move was perfect.  When I think of the lessons that I learned and the values that were instilled in me as I was raised in that area, I cannot imagine a better place to have grown up.

Life in Chilo was not easy for us, but due to God’s miraculous provision, I never sensed even a remote feeling of poverty, and His favor on our lives buffered any racial and cultural tensions.  In those years, I learned vicariously through my mother’s faith how to trust and rely upon God for all things. We never lacked a single necessity, whether material, emotional, or spiritual.  I mention only my mother’s example because my father traveled to Haiti often, and when I was only seven years old, his immigration papers were stripped from him for reasons that are still unknown, forcing him to stay in Haiti.  It would be twelve years before I would see him again face to face.  This left my mother alone to care for her seven children in a foreign world, far from family and far from any sense of familiarity.  It was a hard life, but God was faithful.  No, He was more than faithful.  He was using all of these things for my good, building up the framework for my adult life and my calling.

If I were to recount to you my entire spiritual history, it would be necessary for me to begin before my own birth.  Although their stories have beautifully and divinely framed major aspects of my life, a simple recount of the spiritual heritage passed down to me from my father and my mother would not suffice.  God plans according to His omniscient foresight, and His designs are much more intricate than the branches of a family tree.  I believe that the jigsaw puzzle is a more accurate metaphor for the way that God builds and connects all of our lives.  When learning to put together jigsaw puzzles as a child, I was shown that the expert way to begin is by building the outer frame first.  Once the frame is built, you group colors together and begin to piece together likely matches.  In the beginning, the final product could hardly be imagined without the picture on the box to guide you, but as you arrange and piece together the colors, you begin to form familiar images.  Then you set aside these well-formed images and continue to build until their position becomes evident in the grand scheme of the final picture.

I believe that God works in a similar manner.  Each of our lives is made up of pieces of some elaborate puzzle that God is constructing.  We, being limited to the few pieces that we have in our hands, often find it difficult to visualize the full image, which represents God’s perfect plan for the salvation of the world.  However, God, as the only being who sees the full image, has always worked out His perfect will through what many men would simply consider a puzzling combination of luck, choice, and happenstance.  He framed the image with His very word and nature and He has chosen to fill the center with the vibrant colors emanating from the lives of men in relationship with Him.

In the book of Genesis, God made a promise to Joseph that took him along what we, with carnal thinking, may consider to be a long “detour,” yet when we look at the whole story, it testifies of God’s sovereignty.  Every detail, from Joseph’s years of slavery, to even his simultaneous imprisonment with the baker and the cupbearer, God’s influence in the dream world, coupled with Joseph’s faithfulness to his gift of interpretation led to the fulfillment of his boyhood dreams and also to the deliverance of God’s people from a severe famine.  Where this famine led them to is yet another remarkable story through which God would again demonstrate His sovereignty.  By leading His people into and out of slavery in Egypt, God symbolized and set the scene for the coming salvation of Jesus Christ.

This God is the same God who imagined and is orchestrating your life and my own.  Before I was formed, God framed my life with Christ.  Long before I was born, He began to put together the pieces necessary to prepare for me a post in ministry for His Kingdom. He formed me with the gifts and personal qualities necessary for success, keeping in mind the circumstance that He was birthing me into.  Each day, the big picture becomes a little clearer as the “colors” come together to form images.  It is unlikely that I will ever be able to visualize or comprehend the whole image, but I am learning to be faithful with what is made clear to me.  The pursuit of a theological education, particularly one at Oral Roberts University, is the clearest piece that has come together for this period of my life.

As you may have already imagined, I had a very strong Christian upbringing, and I have inherited a deep Christian heritage.  My father is a pastor and a well-respected leader in the Haitian church.  My mother was the daughter of a man of God of comparable stature to my father.  She, herself, was a strong, prophetic woman and warrior in her prayer closet, and a strong pillar of spiritual support for her household and for many people in the community.  God was at the center of everything that we were a part of and of all that we stood for individually and as a family.  I committed my life to God at a very young age and I immediately began to sense a strong calling on my life.  As a teenager, I developed a deep love for the word of God and I thrived on Christian community.  In my later high school years, as I began to examine my options for a college education, I placed Christian community and spiritual development highest on my list of priorities.  I began to consider a list of great Christian schools in America, and Oral Roberts was at the top of my list.  Then my mother, the last of all people that I would have imagined, advised me to strongly consider a secular school.  Shortly after giving me that advice in my Junior year, my mother passed away, but I held on to her advice and allowed God to lead me to Duke University, a seemingly unlikely place for healthy spiritual growth.

I could have never dreamed up the strong spiritual support that I found at Duke.  Within the first week, God placed me into a group of young men and women who deeply love Him and His word, and are passionate about prayer and worship.  Duke University was a great place for me to pursue a rigorous academic education, and Cambridge Christian Fellowship (the name of the campus ministry that I am a part of at Duke) provided the perfect backdrop for me to pursue what I really desire to pursue the most: the presence and the knowledge of God.  The statistics show that most young people lose their faith in a setting like Duke, but once again, God sovereignly put together the necessary pieces to set up a strong spiritual framework to set me into.  My faith has been growing exponentially from the moment that I arrived.

My understanding of my calling also grew and took shape during my years at Duke.  I had always believed that God was calling me into a ministry in the church, but also into one beyond the pulpit and into the world as a light.  Being a light in a spiritually dark university only increased the weight of this second call.  Exposure to different issues throughout the world also matured my heart for justice.  At the end of my sophomore year I returned to Haiti for the first time since the age of two.  I was reunited with my father, whom I had not seen face to face since the age of seven.  In this short first trip, God began to show me another great piece of His intricate puzzle.  In Haiti, every calling and desire that I had ever felt up until that moment made perfect sense.  For the first time, it even made sense for me, the fifth and youngest son, to carry my father’s name.  (I honestly do not remember ever questioning this fact before, giving it no bearing on the development of my personal aspirations.  Unbeknownst to me the story about my naming is similar to that of John the Baptist.)

In 2007, I took the spring semester off from Duke in order to spend the entire summer and fall in Haiti, serving my God and my country.  My father and I picked up as if we had never left off as I shadowed him in ministry.  As I drew from his 38 years of experience, I found my faith growing in new ways again.  Other doors were immediately open to me in my other domains of interest, including high levels of the Haitian government, to which I feel called.  (Once again, only hindsight can make sense of my wise decision to keep my Haitian Citizenship after twenty years of living in the United States).  What I found in Haiti was the perfect place to insert all of the pieces of my life into.  It is almost as if it all were built around me, even in my absence.  Only the sovereign Lord, who knew me before I was formed, could have designed such a perfect context for my life and future.

Two years ago, if someone were to ask me if I could see myself in a formal seminary program in the future, even with the strong sense of calling into ministry on my life, I would have said no.  My opinion of higher theological education in the United States was very low.  I had heard too many horror stories of religion professors whose goal in life was to destroy faith rather than build it up.  Up to that point, what I had understood about formal seminary programs led me to believe that most of them taught the word of God purely from an academic and traditional standpoint.  A couple of years ago, I had no interest in this kind of education, but God did two things to change my perspective.  First, He made it clear to me that the Apostle Paul’s extensive wisdom was drawn from the deep well of a lifetime of theological education, most likely an education rooted almost entirely in the academic and traditional perspectives.  This tipped the scales, leading me to seriously consider divinity school as an option.  Then, in November of 2007, I took a trip from Haiti to Oklahoma to visit Oral Roberts University, where I was delighted to find the Word of God living and active.  At ORU, I sensed a strong emphasis on building the Kingdom of God as opposed to primarily building minds and egos.  I was also given a taste of a thriving spiritual community that was reminiscent of my spiritual community at Duke.  God spoke to me over that weekend, and it did not take much more for me to picture myself there. I have since learned that men like Dr. Myles Monroe, who has a strong Kingdom-minded approach toward public leadership and (third-world) nation rebuilding, are counted among the ranks of ORU alumni.  If Oral Roberts University played any role in shaping Dr. Monroe’s perspective and preparing him for the work that he is doing through his international leaders organization, I am confident that I will also find the quality of education that I desire there.  Being equipped for this intersection of the Church and politics and public service is essential for my future.

The calling that I have begun to step into the most in Haiti is the one behind the pulpit in ministry to the Body of Christ, yet I feel that the domain that calls my name the loudest is the political field.  My heart responds strongly to Haiti’s need for strong, Godly leaders.  The seemingly natural course for an aspiring politician would be to dive right into the study of law, but the sovereign Lord has designed for me a better curriculum.  I feel a strong call to the pulpit and to the political platform, and I believe that I will spend most of my life serving in both roles simultaneously.  Since both roles will be ever-present in my life, it will be important for me to study the material related to both. Moreover, since these roles will have a great deal of influence on one another, I believe that it is God’s will for me to immerse myself into His law before diving into the laws of men.  I know that a strong theological education from Oral Roberts University will equip me for service in the church and fuel me to burn as a light unto the world, and it will also give to me the right lenses through which to view human laws and politics in the future.