Kenscoff Mayor Massillon Jean said the assault began around 10:30 p.m. Sunday and continued past midnight. Carlos Ruiz Massieu, the U.N. Secretary-General's Special Representative for Haiti, told the Security Council that gunmen burned homes and vehicles, slaughtered livestock, and drove entire families from the community. More than 50 people were abducted during the raid; Haitian officials said 13 of the captives were released six days later, on Aug. 29. An estimated 2,647 residents fled Kenscoff in the attack's wake.
Viv Ansanm, which the United States has designated a foreign terrorist organization, has spent more than a year fighting rival gangs for control of Port-au-Prince and has increasingly pushed its violence into surrounding farming towns like Kenscoff. Haiti now counts nearly 1.5 million people internally displaced, roughly 12 percent of the nation's population, and half of them children.
A building raised as a refuge became, for two dozen souls, a killing floor. That single fact is worth sitting with before reaching for any comfort, because the comfort of the gospel was never meant to paper over horror. It was meant to answer it.
Where Is Safety, Really?
Every displaced family in Kenscoff fled to that church for the same reason people have always fled to church buildings: because it seemed like the one place violence would not follow. It followed anyway. Bricks and a steeple never stopped a bullet, and they never will. The men and women who died inside that compound believed, rightly, that the church was the right place to run to. They were wrong only about what kind of safety a building can offer.
The old preachers used to say it plain: God never promised His people a fence around their bodies. He promised something better, something that gangs, governments, and grief cannot touch.
"God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble." (Psalm 46:1)
Read that verse slowly. It does not say God builds refuges. It says God is the refuge. A wall can be burned down. A congregation can be scattered. But the God who met Israel at the Red Sea and stood inside a furnace with three men in Babylon does not leave the building when the building falls. My friend, if your hope for safety has ever rested on an address, a fence, a lock, or a nation's stability, Kenscoff is a hard mercy — a reminder that every earthly refuge is borrowed time.
That is not despair. It is the doorway to the only hope that survives a night like the one Haiti just endured. Christ did not promise His followers a world without gangs, tyrants, or graves. He promised the opposite, and then He promised to outlast it.
"In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world." (John 16:33)
That is the whole of it. Not that trouble will pass you by, but that Someone has already walked through the worst of it and come out the other side holding the keys. The families who buried their dead this week in Haiti, and the ones still waiting for word on those still carried off into the hills, need more than sympathy from people far away. They need the same refuge the gospel has always offered the persecuted and the terrified: a God near enough to hold in the dark, and strong enough to raise the dead on the last day.
Pray for Haiti's Christians tonight — not as a gesture, but because the only power greater than a gang with guns is the God who is, this very hour, a very present help to everyone crying out to Him from inside that ruin.