remembering Alminda

I’ll always remember Alminda, a fierce looking, weathered, strong Christian woman who was originally from Haiti. She raised a family of 12 there. I met her at a conference I was scoping out. She too was pretty skeptical of this conference and its rock-concert style but somehow she was there. While there we both also met this interesting and refreshingly weird guy who had traveled from Texas. He was in his 50s. He was a jolly, white haired fellow, who wore his pants up too high, held in place by rainbow suspenders. He had the energy of a hyperactive teenager and wasn’t embarrassed to walk up to anyone and tell them their life story...Yes, you heard me right, he told them “everything they ever did.” John 4:29. The crazy thing was that he was always right. So, he walked up to this hardened, skeptical Haitian woman and told her all she had been through. It became a turning point in her life. I watched him do this to several other people. It was amazing. He blessed people in ways they couldn’t describe. He told them their secrets and then told them what God was saying to them. Then he disappeared.

Nobody gave him a prize even though he was better than Benny Hinn. Nobody lauded him. Nobody put him on the main stage. And it seemed to me that if they would have—he would have been ruined and he wouldn’t have been able to do what he did with much success.

Yet Alminda stayed in my life after the conference. She lived in an apartment she had no income to pay for. I would on occasion drive her places. She was a very perceptive lady. And she spent a lot of time in prayer. Her whole life was a life of prayer. On occasion she would tell me her stories. While she lived in Haiti and was raising her family, she would go to church any time the doors were opened. Outside of that she prayed. There for a time, every Saturday she would pray for the Sunday service. Every Saturday, God would reveal to her the exact message that was going to be preached on Sunday. She would then go to her pastor’s house and tell him what God had revealed to her. Repeatedly, it was the exact sermon he had prepared for that coming Sunday.

She talked about the effects this had on the young, sometimes insecure pastor. Needless to say he was a little freaked out. We would then talk about ways to not get tripped up in the insecurities (our own or another’s) but to instead live in and project a message of God’s ever present love and closeness to others. He is the water. I am the conduit. He is the potter. I am the clay.