Teri Gunnink in Relevant Magazine
For this generation of believers, the inevitable reaction to a national disaster is talking. Young people are blogging about what leading Christian voices said. They are trying to understand why God would allow such a devastating event to occur. But such a response is really no different than apathy, if nothing gets done.
Three years ago, blogging and discussion might have also been Teri Gunnink’s reaction to the cataclysmic earthquake that struck the Republic of Haiti on Jan. 12, 2010, killing thousands of men, women and children. Back then, she barely knew the country existed-it was merely an island on the map. Gunnink had absolutely no clue that God had already arranged for her to unveil His kingdom to the Haitian people. In fact, she had other plans.
Growing up in tiny Aztec, New Mexico, Gunnink always dreamed of doing missions work. As a child, she had a strange obsession with Africa. Though, the thought of traveling halfway around the world and ministering to individuals she knew nothing about seemed unrealistic. So she set her ambitions aside and started thinking “practically,” which led her to the University of New Mexico to major in Business.
Before long, though, Gunnink’s childhood desires began to reappear. After graduating college, she found herself googling “long-term mission trips.” By January 2009, God had supplied the funds, and she was launching out of the United States with more than 50 others on The World Race-a yearlong missions adventure in which individuals in their 20s journey through more than 11 countries and compete in extraordinary challenges, from sleeping on floors and eating bugs, to working with church plants in the world’s most impoverished areas. Not only was she living a childhood dream, Gunnink was finally following God’s calling on her life.
After spending the first month in the Dominican Republic, Gunnink’s team traveled by vehicle to the second stop-Haiti. Gunnink wasn’t looking forward to this leg of the venture. “I had no desire to go there,” she recounts. And she wasn’t welcomed kindly. Gunnink saw tremendous poverty: people sleeping in garbage piles, children without clothes, restrooms and wells in the same location. It was a shadowy wasteland.
And as the trip came to a close, she spent a night praying for her new little friend. “During this time, I definitely knew the Lord was leading me back to Haiti in some capacity,” Gunnink recalls. The Caribbean country that she had once greatly dreaded was now on the radar as her future mission field.
The truth is, not everyone will have a vision and love for Haiti like Gunnink’s. Not everyone can physically go and respond to the disaster. People have jobs, families. Not everyone can give, either. And despite how easy it is to debate and complain about secondary issues, the response that carries no excuses and only makes sense is prayer.
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