Satisfying Thirsts, Cleansing Souls: Eight Years in Haiti

By R. H. Coder

Satisfying Thirsts, Cleansing Souls is a narrative of the lives of Joyce and Bob Coder as they guided Wellspring of Life Ministry through eight years of living in Haiti. You will soar to the mountaintops of spiritual victories as they fight through battles with voodoo and see the Lord help them overcome it, and you will dive into the depths of valleys of defeat as their efforts seemingly meet with failures. But throughout, you will see God's hand guiding and orchestrating through drilling wells for potable water, to hosting revivals on the enemy's doorstep, to cleansing an entire village of voodoo. Ride along with them as they encounter the hardships and dangers of living in Haiti--near-death experiences and fighting through tropical diseases like malaria and dengue fever--as well as spiritual miracles that are unexplainable, God's provision and protection, ordained meetings, and partnerships, and two individuals in their fifties who simply answered God's call to serve the lost! It's all here, and the excitement will keep you reading until you can see yourself in these roles. This journey will prove to you that all that is necessary to serve God on the foreign field is a desire to be obedient to God!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9798890432605

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Satisfying Thirsts, Cleansing Souls

Eight Years in Haiti

R. H. Coder

ISBN 979-8-89043-259-9 (paperback)

ISBN 979-8-89043-303-9 (hardcover)

ISBN 979-8-89043-260-5 (digital)

Copyright © 2023 by R.H. Coder

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

This book is dedicated to Joyce Louise Coder, my wife. Joyce passed on to her celestial home on September 5, 2020. Someone told me that losing your spouse is something you never get over; you just get better at living with the loss. Joyce was my best friend, my wife, my lover, and my spiritual anchor! God so knit us together that it was as if we were Siamese! We laughed, cried, prayed together, and held each other tightly as God grew us in Him. She was selfless, loving, dedicated, and totally sold out for God! Whether it was taking ten orphans into our home to raise or gathering up a stray cat or dog that needed attention, Joyce simply gave of herself. Thank you, God, for the precious gift of Joyce. I can't wait to see her again!

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Afterword

For the Reader

About the Author

This book is dedicated to Joyce Louise Coder, my wife. Joyce passed on to her celestial home on September 5, 2020. Someone told me that losing your spouse is something you never get over; you just get better at living with the loss. Joyce was my best friend, my wife, my lover, and my spiritual anchor! God so knit us together that it was as if we were Siamese! We laughed, cried, prayed together, and held each other tightly as God grew us in Him. She was selfless, loving, dedicated, and totally sold out for God! Whether it was taking ten orphans into our home to raise or gathering up a stray cat or dog that needed attention, Joyce simply gave of herself. Thank you, God, for the precious gift of Joyce. I can't wait to see her again!

Introduction

In our youth, we look at ladders and think we can climb and conquer anything, any height, any barrier, any trial. And as we grow through our teenage years, we become more and more certain that nothing or no one can hold us back…if we want it, we can achieve it! And then college or young adulthood convinces us that the world has it all wrong. Somehow, we've been given insight that nobody else seems to have. No social paradigm will rein us in; we'll do it our way and in our time.

But somewhere along our path to success, happiness, and fulfillment something goes awry. Some of us experience the worldly success we've so long dreamed of, but somehow, it leaves us strangely empty and wanting something more. Others seem to run into the proverbial brick wall with every turn we take and never make the headway we desire. And still others fall into almost complete ruin through drugs, alcohol, broken marriages, and lives of crime that end in prison, or worse.

Walking in a sin-filled world offers no easy paths. There are pitfalls waiting around every turn that we encounter akin to Christian and his pilgrimage to the Celestial City in The Pilgrim's Progress. Many times our first encounters with these pitfalls occur in our own home during our formative years. Some will grow up in single-parent households where either father or mother is absent, causing areas of our personas to remain unformed or malformed. Others will have homes where adultery is an ongoing malignancy that produces screaming and violent arguments between the parents. Some will live through seeing one parent being abusive to the other, and even worse, some will experience sexual and physical abuse themselves. Even those blessed to grow up in normal or Christian homes are not assured of finding the right road.

Exiting our preteen years and entering into preadult years with baggage created out of the abovenamed circumstances put us into precarious situations. Many times you may be carrying demons that you're not yet aware of, demons that will manifest themselves in the coming years. This can result in an immediate separation from any contact or teaching you've had with or about God. Despite all these handicaps, there is, I believe, an internal yearning to know why we're here, to know who the leader of this orchestra we call earth and humankind is. Romans 1:18–32 tells us we are without excuse for not following God, that all of creation cries out to His existence. We're told that God will deliver us over to our perverted desires if we exchange the truth of God for a lie. C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity tells us there is an innate sense of right and wrong within us that had to come from an outside source. It's not something we conjured up on our own; it's just that we know what we should do. Something or someone had to plant that knowledge within us…and that someone, of course, is God! So even when we are not intentionally seeking after God, there is an inner sense that we should be. We may not want to give up our lifestyles, but the morning after, we know we did something we should not have done! But knowing it and choosing not to do it are two entirely different things. How do we find the Way, and how do we get the strength to choose it?

By the time God finally got my attention, I had ruined much of my life. I should rather say that by the time I responded to God calling me, I had ruined much of my life and damaged the lives of the ones I loved the most. It is not my intent to tell you all the horrible missteps I took in the first half of my life; rather, I want to share with you how God saved me in spite of myself. After two failed marriages, I was spiraling fast toward complete destruction. One day there was a knock on my door, and it was my ex-wife, and in her hand was a paperback version of the King James Bible. She simply said, I've found some peace, and I know you need some also, and she gave me the Bible and left.

It was at that very moment that the Spirit of God fell on me. I took that Bible and locked myself in my bedroom and began to read for six to eight hours at a time. I didn't feel like I wanted to read; it was as if I could not read! Like it was out of my control.

I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. (Ezekiel 36:26 NKJV)

I will put My law in their minds, and write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. (Jeremiah 31:33 NKJV)

The God of our fathers has chosen you that you should know His will, and see the Just One, and hear the voice of His mouth. (Acts 22:14 NKJV)

That's what happened to me that day; God took over! I don't know why He chose to call me, to save me, but I'm filled with gratitude that He did! And this book is meant to be a testimony to His grace and not to build ourselves up as some kind of super missionaries. We were simply tools in His hands. He used us to accomplish His work, and that is what this story is about!

Now a new ladder was in front of me, and I was oh so eager to begin the climb. However, I had no idea the difficulties I would encounter as I attempted to rise just one more step up this ladder toward God and had even less of an idea how the blessings would explode exponentially with each rung gained.

Chapter 1

Setting the Ladder

After a couple of weeks of being cooped up in my room, reading the Bible, I began to feel an urge to attend a church service. It wasn't as if I had been unchurched; I was raised in the church and had played at Jesus most of my life. I should probably say I played poorly at Jesus! I had taught Sunday school, served on boards of churches, but all the while, I was walking outside of God. I knew what I should and shouldn't be doing but seemed to be incapable of doing those things. I was Paul in Romans 7:17–25:

So now I am no longer the one doing it but it is sin living in me. For I know that nothing good lives in me that is in my flesh. For the desire to do what is good is with me, but there is no ability to do it. For I do not do the good that I want to do, but I practice the evil that I do not want to do. Now if I do what I do not want I am no longer the one that does it, but it is the sin that lives in me. So I discover this law: When I want to do what is good, evil is present with me. For in my inner self I delight in God's law, but I see a different law in the parts of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and taking me prisoner to the law of sin in the parts of my body. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, with my mind I myself am serving the law of God, but with my flesh, the law of sin.

But now God was pulling me back to Him. I felt as if I needed to go to church for reasons I really didn't understand. I wanted to go, but I didn't want anyone to know I was going…so I lied about where I was going on Sunday morning. Doesn't sound like the ideal way to find my way to God, but it would work! On my first visit back into church, I chose a large one where I was sure I could get in and out without seeing anyone I knew. I have no idea what the message was or even much of a memory of being there; however, I did feel good or better when I left the service. It didn't last for long, but I could definitely feel a difference. I began to live my lie regularly, and as I did, the feel good would last a bit longer each time I went. Somehow, I discovered that my ex-wife was attending the same church, and I didn't want her to think I was chasing after her; so I would attend the second service and sit in the back so as not to run into her. Obviously, I still had an ego problem to go along with all of my other shortcomings.

One Sunday, as I was entering the service, she was exiting; and we bumped into each other. We decided we would meet for breakfast and talk. Not long after that, we had both rededicated our lives to God, in separate services, and agreed to meet on Wednesday evenings to read the Bible together. It was as if we were two completely different people! Our minds, our needs, our desires had been morphed into something entirely foreign to our old selves. There was a new joy in us, and we really didn't know how to explain it other than the fact that we now wanted more of Christ in our lives and enjoyed chasing after it. The more we met to read together, the closer we grew to one another, and within three months, we were remarried in our new church. God had restored what we had broken apart. No, not just restored; He made it so much better than before. Now we had become that three-ply cord; we were being held together by Christ Himself!

God had placed an intense desire for Him within us, and we simply couldn't get enough of Him. As we grew in Him, our desire to serve Him grew by leaps and bounds. Soon we found ourselves heading a group of believers to carry out an inner-city ministry for the impoverished black children of our city. Each Saturday morning, we would load up a truck with a stage, sound equipment, backdrops, and tons of accessories and head to a vacant lot in the city. At the same time, we drove the church bus to the complexes where the children were housed and would go door-to-door, explaining what we were doing and asking permission to bus their children to the empty lot for a two-hour program, after which we would return them. It was a great program complete with skits, songs, and games, and the children loved it. After the first week, we never again had to go door-to-door; they were outside waiting on us. It was a tremendous amount of work to set up, do the program, return the children, return the stage and props, but it was so fulfilling! We were loving our new lives!

Continuing in the church, we found more ways to serve; and I began to take classes in the seminary of the church. One of the additional ways we served was to get involved in missions. This church was extremely missions-oriented, with a group heading somewhere seemingly every month. One of the teams was a medical missions team that took literally thousands and thousands of dollars' worth of medicines on their trips. This required collecting the meds and then stripping them out of their packages so they could be flat-packed for transport. We would work many Saturdays, many hours, ripping apart med packages and then counting them into individual plastic bags for use in a makeshift pharmacy on the trips.

One Sunday in church, the leader of the medical team came up to us and said, God told me to invite the two of you to go to Honduras with us! We were stunned. We had never thought of actually going on a trip; we were just helping them to prepare for a trip. The invitation quickly penetrated our hearts, and after prayer, our answer was a most definite yes. The trip to Honduras could not have been any better for us. We loved everything about it: the difficulties, the hardships, the chaos, but most of all, the opportunity to share God with men, women, and children who were walking without Him. It almost bubbled out of us with unconstrained enthusiasm. The team was so well organized and accomplished so much it was hard to take in. To be used by God in a manner such as this felt like the ultimate high. It is necessary for us to say thank you to our missions mother, Dr. Tonya Hawthorne.

For the next several years, we were blessed to be allowed to be a part of the New Frontiers Health Force. We literally went around the world with her and her teams, getting filled by the Holy Spirit as we ministered physically and spiritually to many different cultures. We were living adventures with God. Seeing miracles firsthand was a reinforcement of our faith that we probably could not have gotten anywhere else. What a blessing it was for