This weeks story comes from a good friend of Deidox and fellow filmmaker Chris Sinclair.  In the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake, Pastor Ronel Mesidor turned his church and home into shelters for aid.  This short documentary tells how God used one man to offer comfort and hope in the midst of tragedy.

LL Vignette: Mesidor’s Story from Last Letter on Vimeo.

What is True Story Tuesday? Since the goal of Deidox is to tell true stories of how God is at work, very often we hear of powerful stories or situations that for one reason or another haven’t been made into a Deidox film. (Or, perhaps we should say they haven’t been made into films “yet.” You never know what the future might bring.) So every tuesday is True Story Tuesday where on our blog we post a quick story about how God is at work.

Hey Guys!

This Tuesday’s story comes from our good friend Seth Barnes’ blog Radical Living In A Comfortable World. He’s in Haiti right now and we thought we would share this.

So many things have been crushed in Haiti, people, homes, and government buildings. You’d think that hope would be one of them. Today we saw where a building had tumbled down on a man, snuffing his life out, leaving his blood and his shoes behind in the rubble. You’d think hope was lost in the rubble too.

But what we’re seeing has defied all our expectations.

We drove to meet a pastor and found the road blocked. Ahead in the middle of the street a band was playing and hundreds of people were dancing. We stopped and our gang piled out of the van. It wasn’t any one church – it was just a bunch of people celebrating the kingdom coming to Haiti through their dance.

Our youth pastors dove in and joined with them – twirling and singing with the masses.

Coming back they raved, “Wow – that was awesome! It was a moment of pure spiritual joy.”

We drove through the city streets and came to a complete halt as a huge parade of people blocked our way. They were carrying signs, “Jesus for Haiti. Haiti for Jesus.” They were singing. They were chanting. They were marching and dancing.

You can go a lifetime and never see anything like this. We can sing “Rend the heavens and come down,” but God already did – it’s happening here in Port-au-Prince.

What is True Story Tuesday? Since the goal of Deidox is to tell true stories of how God is at work, very often we hear of amazing stories that for one reason or another haven’t been made into a Deidox film. (Or, perhaps we should say they haven’t been made into films “yet.” You never know what the future might bring.) So every tuesday is True Story Tuesday where we post a new story about how God is at work.

Greetings friends. Welcome to the first blog post from the new Deidox True Story Tuesdays, where every tuesday we’ll share a story of how God is at work in the world today.

This week’s story comes from an email from a filmmaker that has lived in Haiti for quite some time as a missionary…

“I’ve been meaning to write each of you. Some of you I have, some I haven’t yet. It’s been the most bizarre and awful 10 days of my life. The earthquake has hit me and my friends and family really hard. Our house may no longer be livable. It has a few cracks here and there, but the strong aftershocks keep happening and I’m sure they weaken the house in some degree every time. Some of my friends have died. One student of mine died. Her house collapsed on her and her mother. Dead bodies lined the streets, so many people had broken bones and smashed skulls. But the worst thing might have been the smell. You can literally smell the death in the streets and among the hurting. There seems to be little hope in the eyes of the Haitians.

But God is providing, protecting, and helping though. He has performed so many miracles. Well, miracles to us, but miracles are very natural for Him. I’ll tell you one quickly. A friend’s mission was giving out water from their cistern to whomever needed it. They gave all they could and in a few days it was gone. We all have cisterns to hold our only water in Haiti, it’s not like the US. So they went to sleep that night with an empty cistern. The next morning they woke up and checked their cistern and it was full to the brim! Awesome =) Check out Isaiah 33:15-16 to see God’s promise on that.”

True Story Tuesday is something new from the Deidox team. The goal of Deidox is to tell true stories of how God is at work, and very often we hear of amazing stories that for one reason or another haven’t been made into a Deidox film. (Or, perhaps we should say they haven’t been made into films “yet.” You never know what the future might bring.) So starting this week we’ll be posting True Story Tuesday updates every tuesday morning.

We’ve got some fun ideas cooking for True Story Tuesdays, so stay tuned. We hope you find them both challenging and inspiring.

Bonus for pastors: We hope some of these true story tuesday blog posts can help provide illustrations for your sermons. Both Dave and Brent are PK’s, so they hope is that at least one of these stories replaces an embarrassing story about your child that you were going to tell.

We have a video to share with you today, and we think you’ll find it quite inspiring.

For those who haven’t been following our tweets (Deidox), a former boss of Brent’s was in Haiti filming for Compassion International when the earthquake hit. For 65 hours after the earthquake hit nobody heard anything from Dan Woolley. His last known whereabouts was the Hotel Montana, which if you look at the picture below was completely wiped out during the quake. Yet miraculously Dan survived, pulled out of the rubble after 65 hours. In the above video you will hear of the ordeal firsthand, with Dan boldly proclaiming how God brought him through.

Extra bonus: If you’d like to hear more, Dan’s story was also featured on NPR.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122623093#

The Hotel Montana, before and after the earthquake