By Thomas Hurst When I looked down at my iPhone I saw "BLOCKED." The only one I know who calls me from a blocked number is Pastor Mark Driscoll. I answer, "This is Thomas." "Hey man, this is Pastor Mark …"

A Legacy Redirected

I met Pastor Mark many years ago when my life was crashing down around me. At a time when God was loving me so much that He began to annihilate every false idol in my life – my career, marriage and me. I got assigned to photograph Pastor Mark for the newspaper I was working for and I spent two weeks shadowing him at home with his family, at work teaching local pastors twice his age, on Sunday preaching fire and brimstone, in his old blue truck cruising from one place to the other and at the video store picking out movies for the family. I asked him lots of questions. I didn’t care who he was; I just wanted to know things about God that I couldn’t get answers to anywhere else. In that two weeks, and through Mark, who told me truth, didn’t patronize me or make excuses for the Gospel – God did a work on my heart and I saw that Jesus Christ was my Lord and Savior. Over the years, Pastor Mark and Grace have played a pivotal role in my marriage to Angela, me as a husband and father, my love for Christ, and the legacy of my family.

A Journey to Haiti

"…There's a private jet headed to Haiti in two days and I can take three other guys," Pastor Mark continued. "I’m taking a two-man film crew – you want to roll?" "Well Pastor Mark, I’ve got a few meetings coming up, I’m moving my family in a week, I have renters moving into my place in two weeks and I’m going under the knife for emergency surgery, but I think I can squeeze you and a private jet to Haiti in there." I didn’t actually say any of that. My answer was a very quick and direct "yes." A few days later, Pastor Mark, an unbelievable two-man video team with Jesse Bryan and John Clem, myself , Pastor James McDonald of Harvest Bible Chapel in Chicago, Ill., and three other men from his church were on the ground in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Our first official stop was an old Bible college in the hills of the capital. The grounds of the school were surrounded by a tall wall. Inside that wall, several hundred hurt and displaced Haitians from the surrounding communities were seeking refuge. This number increased to a couple thousand after sunset when people no longer had the safety of daylight. On the other side of the wall was what any street in Port-Au-Prince would appear to be – hustle and bustle. People were coming and going, mixed goods being bought and sold, homes made of cinderblocks or sheet metal, lots of walking, talking, some biking and a little driving. As the Mars Hill and Harvest Bible team intermingled with the professors of the Bible college and local Haitians, a gun shot rang out. I stepped out of a partially collapsed building and immediately followed the rush of people to the wall and climbed up to get a look. Below me stood a quickly forming crowd in a wide circle around a young man who lay dead in the street from a shot to the head. His sunglasses, portable headphones, music player and what looked like a couple packs of cigarettes or playing cards lay in a pool of blood. I leaned over the wall and started shooting the horrible scene. Something always happens to me in these extreme situations – I get both tunnel vision and acute awareness. I can only see what is through the viewfinder of the camera, and yet I see and almost feel everything moving around me. I know there is noise, but I can’t hear it. As everything around me seems so out of control, I become intensely focused and a switch inside me flips to off – I stop feeling anything. I see this young man dead, his brains blown out, blood pouring out of his ear. I see a son not coming home to his mother, a husband separated from his wife, a father taken from his children. What score needed to be settled that this was the answer? What life is so cheap that the world just moves by? But these aren’t new questions for me, I started asking them during my first trip to Haiti.

Haunted

In 1996 I was in Haiti and photographed another young man who was beat to death in the streets. It was the most horrific thing I’ve ever witnessed and since that day I have struggled with a deep sense of guilt for not having tried to stop it. The fact is, I just never thought the mob of men were actually going to kill him and by the time I realized the young man was not going to be rescued by anyone else, his guts were hanging out of his stomach and he was screaming for his life. I didn’t hear him scream, but I have a roll of film, 36 frames, that captured the last minutes of his life from the fear he felt as they dragged him out of a truck to his death as he lay in the streets gutted and bludgeoned. I know he screamed because the 36 frames show it, I just couldn’t hear it. He haunts me to this day and deep down I believe I deserve to be haunted. I will never forget what happened and what didn’t happen that day. A week after that terrible experience, I flew home to California, changed by what I had seen and the shame I felt. Just days after arriving back home I read an article about some teens who beat a man to death as he walked home. It was clear that the harsh violence I had witnessed in Haiti in 1996 was not a Haitian problem, but a humanity problem. We kill each other, we hate each other, not because of where we come from, but because of who we are.

Today

Now, as I look at the image of the young Haitian man I stood over just a few short weeks ago, contemplate the young man whose body I stood over 14 years earlier in the same city, and all the other bodies I have stood over in my life, I am reminded of the verse James 1:19-20: "Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God." Anger, violence, and intimidation will never change the hearts of men, only God, through Christ, with the power of the Holy Spirit can do that.  In all that I have seen and experienced, I rest in that I love a God who loved me first, who came into human history to reconcile me to Him. A God who lives inside me every minute of every day of my disastrously sinful life and by His grace alone, allows me to breath another breathe, kiss my wife another day, hug my children another night. The only hope I have is in Him who gives us life and although I can’t explain away all the murder and violence I’ve documented, I know that God is a good and loving God, not because I said so, because He does.