For eighteen months I traveled to Jamaica to serve a small church on an interim basis. It was part of what I inherited when my father died, the pastorate and the denominational duties that came with it. Most of my time was spent in Kingston. The poverty there was worse than anything I had ever seen. My only other trip abroad had been to Bermuda, where everybody seemed to have three jobs and nobody seemed poor. Jamaica was another world.
Then I accepted an invitation to preach a two week revival in St. Ann Parish. That was the time that changed my life.
By then I had made my peace with the call. I was still committed to social activism, but I had found a leadership style that was balanced and Biblical. I had also been the national coordinator of a civil rights organization, and that status came with a lifestyle. Even in Jamaica I stayed in the best hotels and kept my comforts while poverty surrounded me. After all, I had been trained by a celebrity preacher.
I knew my visit to St. Ann was unusual. They told me no one from New York had ever come to that town to preach. It felt like the right thing to do, and I felt a little heroic doing it. For the sake of authenticity, I even agreed to stay in the home of one of the deacons, up the road from the church. That was new for me. The only private home I had ever stayed in when I traveled was the home of Jesse Jackson’s mother, Helen Jackson, in Greenville, South Carolina. There was no way I was going to tell her son we had spent money on a hotel instead of accepting her bedroom and her meal. But that was the one exception.
The closest hotel to Lower Buxton was in Runaway Bay, 13.5 miles away and a full hour by those roads. Staying in a resort while serving a rural community made no sense to me. So I agreed to live with the deacon, and I felt noble and righteous about it.
That feeling did not last.
Lower Buxton was a hundred years behind the world I came from. The roads were dirt. The homes had no electricity and no running water. There were no indoor bathrooms. I felt like I had traveled back in time.
My sense of nobility gave way to plain discomfort. The people were amazed that an accomplished preacher would humble himself and live among the poorest folks he had ever met. In my head I was doing the right thing.
The deacon I stayed with was a man named McCain. He had a yam farm that yielded one harvest every ten months. After the harvest he hauled his crop 6.6 miles to the market in Brownstown and sold it for $700. He lived off that $700 for the next ten to twelve months.
After a few days I was in tears. Shaving outdoors in the rain, using an outhouse, traveling to Brownstown just to make a phone call. It broke me. I was miserable, and I could not show it or say it to anyone. I was miserable about being miserable.
I was disappointed in myself. I felt like a hypocrite and a failure. I was doing what I thought would please God and hating every second of it. I had come to be a blessing to these people, and I had never once understood who they were or how they lived.
Then it came to me. This is how the majority of dark skinned people in the world live. My call to ministry had said yes to what Jesus called the least of these, not only to those who could afford first class travel and five star hotels. I had to decide what kind of preacher I was going to be. Lower Buxton laid the choice in front of me.
The truth is my first instinct was to make this my last assignment. This was not what I signed up for. I had prepared to preach in churches, lead marches, hold press conferences, sit for television interviews. I had been trained to name the problems that powerful people were supposed to solve, and to live comfortably while I named them. I wanted to get back to New York as fast as I could.
But God broke me. I saw that if my commitment did not include this kind of ministry, then I was closer to an entertainer than a servant. I was seeking to be served instead of to serve. So I asked God to forgive my arrogance. I finished the services. I concluded my time there by baptizing 184 new converts in Runaway Bay.
Before I left, I collected $135 from the team members who traveled with me, and we bought McCain a mule. When we handed him the money he broke down and cried. At the rate he was saving, the mule was never going to be his. His grandson would have been the one to finally afford it. That mule let him double the size of his yam farm and double his income in his own lifetime.
In the years since I have preached in Haiti, in Ghana, in places poorer than Lower Buxton. I don’t limit my focus to where the good hotel is. I go the way St. Ann taught me to go.
I will always be grateful to those people. God used them to save my ministry.
Amen! 👏🏽 Thank you for such a beautiful message of humanity.