Missions and Mistakes

In preparing to come to the Dominican Republic for a teaching ministry I asked our home church to send some illustrated Bibles. It seemed like a great way to share the Good News with interested people – especially when the literacy rate cannot be assumed to be high. So our church sent several large, heavy boxes of these illustrated Bibles called “Good and Evil”.



Somewhere along the way, one detail was overlooked. The Bibles that were sent were in English and this country is a Spanish speaking country. Since a private missionary airline service flies our mail in from Florida the postage was another dollar and a half per pound above what the regular postage was. This made it economically impractical to send the books back. Our mistake sat for over a year in our spare closet.

On Easter Sunday a few weeks ago my wife and I attended a small English speaking church in the evening that needed a substitute piano player. They had asked my wife to play the piano so we enjoyed some English speaking fellowship for a change.

After the service I met a middle-aged bachelor who was also visiting this church for a few weeks while he rested from his mission work. Thomas worked for a mission organization that is founded and operated by the Haitian people. He is the only foreigner who works with them. Part of his responsibilities require him to be a mediator between them and the various English speaking organizations that they find necessary to communicate with in order to get their job done … especially recently in the wake of the earthquake. They are trying to get supplies to help their churches with such items as food and tents and Bibles.

The organization is called God Aid Us. Its initials (GAU) in the common language that Haitians speak mean something like “go get it done”. Obviously, something is lost in translation. However, I was impressed with the way they seem to operate. They want to put most all money and supplies that are given to them into the hands of the common people. Therefore they have a low budget grassroots ministry where there is very little administrative costs. For example, Thomas sleeps in a tent or in someone’s home instead of a hotel when he visits a place to help.

One goal of GAU is to teach the people to be independent. One facet of that is to teach them the language of the Internet … English. So, English classes are in demand. They teach English by using English Bibles … what they can find … or any kind of Christian material in English so they can share the good news of the gospel of Christ. Can you see where I’m heading with this?

When I told him the story about our mistake sitting in our spare closet his eyes lit up. The following day he showed up at my apartment and took those Bibles off my hands. This was such an encouragement to know that God can use a mistake for His glory.