·“Watch what I do while you rest.”
This is what I felt the Lord whisper to my heart at the start of our three-month sabbatical. Do we really trust the Lord with our lives? If we truly stop when He tells us to stop, will everything still go well? To rest is a great challenge. Most of us would say we long for it, but little do we realize that to truly rest is to give up control. Surrender.
But let’s start even before we headed stateside for this sabbatical. Every aspect of it was a miracle. It was July of 2022 and I was feeling at the brink of burnout. I told Jesse I felt that I needed a break from Haiti and he agreed. But as we looked at the practicals of our responsibilities and finances it just didn’t look like it could happen. We needed $10,000 for the next school building to be finished within the next two months and had about ZERO dollars in our travel account.
But God has quite the way of working things out that are in His plan…
Toward the end of July, our dear friend Kathy Warren messaged. Her and her late husband, Terry, had served with But God Ministries for several years in Toman, a village about an hour and a half down the mountain from us. Our connection with them was immediate, and they became family. Kathy messaged asking how much we needed for the current project and also if our family needed anything specifically. What?!? So I told her about the $10,000 need for the school building and that our family was hoping for a break from Haiti. Long story short… within the week her church family pledged to raise money for the school building and Kathy personally sent us a check that covered ALL the cost of our sabbatical. ONLY GOD. The massive message for us during this time was that God cared for our community AND for our family. He doesn’t desire for us to simply survive… He wants us to thrive in Him. With the project funded and our family set financially for travel, we prepped our team and school facilities for the start of our seventh year of Cornerstone School of Truth.
At the end of September 2022, we made our Haiti home ready for hurricane season, said our “see you laters” to our community and headed to the states for three months.
During the first half of our sabbatical, we exhaled the breath we didn’t know we were holding. We also found ourselves in a whirlwind of crazy provision and by the end of October found ourselves owning a travel trailer and a truck! And yes… in that order. There is so much to THAT story, but I’ll save it for another time. As we were seeing God’s extravagant provision over our family, we were also learning to let go and trust God with our team and with the work in Haiti. It wasn’t ours to begin with… Cornerstone Haiti belongs to God. As we sank into a deeper rest during our sabbatical, the Lord began speaking to our hearts in a way that honestly made us very uncomfortable. If the state of Haiti isn’t changing for some time, what is our next step? Dear friends asked good, challenging questions about the sustainability of us living in Haiti and we felt God very strongly in those conversations. It felt like the largest step of faith we had been challenged to take up to that point… NOT return to Haiti in January, but begin establishing a home in the states.
To some this may seem like an easy choice, but our entire marriage and growth of our family up to that point happened with home in Gwo Cheval, Haiti. We had a team looking to our leadership and so many dreams still on our heart for our community. It felt like we would be abandoning our team in such a great time of need. We poured out our hearts before the Lord as we didn’t want to take a step that He wasn’t leading. His still small voice, His wisdom and His presence of peace confirmed the way forward.
At the beginning of January 2023, Jesse flew back to our Haiti home… alone. This would be a solo ten-day trip, not a Lancour family homecoming.
With me tasked with finding a place to park our travel trailer for an unknown amount of time, Jesse had the difficult responsibility of explaining to our team things that we didn’t even understand. We knew we were entering into a season of transition, but had no solid answers to what the near future would hold.
The one thing we did know, was that we all were being called into deeper surrender and deeper trust. New adventures with Jesus lay ahead for Cornerstone Haiti that would challenge deeper places of faith in us all.