It is late, and darkness shrouds the group digging the hole intended to be the final resting place of the man lying bound on the ground nearby. 

He is to be buried alive.

Not far away are people whom he's never met, begging God for a miracle. 

Begging for God to intervene in the life of the man who is paying the price of his sins.  Pleading for someone - somehow - somewhere - someway - to be able to reach into his life and show him Christ's love before it is too late. 

And God - as he always does - answered those prayers.

But let me go back to the beginning...

There was a thief that has been robbing the homes of a nearby community, making it difficult for people to leave their homes unguarded for even the short time needed to go to church.  They set a trap for the thief yesterday, using potatoes.

Needless to say, the trap worked. 

After catching their victim in the act, they proceeded to debase him in every way imaginable.  Then they forced him to walk to the kasek's (our local authority) house, beating him when he fell due to weakness from loss of blood and sheer exhaustion.  I don't know exactly what happened there, but I do know that he was eventually turned back into the hands of his captors. 

Sometime after, they decided to walk him to Petit Goave, and started off with the ever-weakening man in tow.

We'll probably never know the timetable exactly, but it was at some point around in here that Janell came into the room where Whit, Mali and I were talking and said that she couldn't get this thief that we had heard had been captured, beaten, and left in the hands of the people out of her mind. We had by that point all spent time praying for him separately, but she reminded us of the verse "where two or three are gathered in my name, there I will be in the midst of them".

So with sober hearts, and the knowledge that by that point it may well have been too late (angry Haitians who do not know Christ can be absolutely ruthless), we bowed our heads and pleaded with God for his mercy on this unknown man's soul.

Out in the darkness of the night, the man was no longer able to walk by the time he reached the riverbed not too far from here. After dragging him a little farther up the trail, they apparently abandoned the idea of taking him the whole way out to to Petit Goave.

The grave-digging commenced.

I cannot imagine what that man must have been feeling, as he lay there and listened to the sound of his funeral. Knowing that he was to placed in that hole, and buried alive. Knowing that he was about to enter eternity.

Suddenly, and for no obvious cause, most of the group digging the hole freaked out and decided to go home, leaving just a few guys to drag the thief back to the biwo that serves as the local holding cell for law-breakers to spend the night.

Some would call it pure happenstance. Some would call it simply fate.

I say it was God, answering the prayers and tears of his children.

But it gets better. The next morning, both Donny and Mali were gifted the opportunity to shine our Father's love into his dark and empty life when we were asked if a nurse could come to bandage his wounds before they sent him out the trail on a moto.

We'll probably never find out exactly what happened in his heart when he felt their kindness in the midst of the hatred being showered on him. I doubt we'll ever see him again, and perhaps never hear exactly what becomes of him.

But this I know - I'll never forget him. The image of his open and incomplete grave will be with me until the day I die.

His memory will forever be a mixture of a dark night, salty tears, pleading, pain, Frederson Joseph singing "Delivrans Ou Nou Bezwen" (We Need Your Deliverance)...and then the realization in the morning that our Father had given us exactly what we had been asking for.

Darkness mixed with light. Despair with hope.

Our ever-present, never-failing Hope.