Helfens Telfort: Brown Scholarship Recipient

Learn more about the Harold and Mary Brown Endowed Scholarship.

Being a student here at Emmaus is a really big deal for me, because I am the oldest of twenty children, and any kind of education was always a major gift growing up.  My father and mother live outside of Port-du-Pere in NW Haiti, and my mom is one of my father’s three wives. 

Growing up with nineteen brothers and sisters wasn’t easy. Sometimes there was enough food, and sometimes there wasn’t. Sometimes I got to go to school, if someone helped us, and sometimes I didn’t.  

In 2013, I became really sick.  My feet and ankles became so large, swollen and painful that I couldn’t walk. My family tried to do what they could for me, but nothing helped, and I continued to decline and be in pain.

Someone who knew I was suffering told my family about Jesus, and told my family about a man who followed him. They called him a pastor, and after I continued to get worse, my parents asked the pastor to come to my house and to please help me. 

The pastor came, and told us that he was no doctor, but that his God was The Great Healer, and that he would pray for me.  As the pastor was praying for me–the first time anyone ever prayed for me–I tried to pray, too.  I told his God that if He would help me, I would surely follow Him forever. 

Two weeks after the pastor had prayed for me, I was entirely healed and playing soccer with my friends again…and I didn’t forget my promise.  I went and found that pastor and his church and asked him to show me how to give my life and future to Jesus. 

My whole life had been so desperate up to that point.  Growing up, we spent all of our time trying to find ways to eat and live. We’d always been playing the lottery, trying to trick people for a profit, trying to make money in ungodly ways. 

But as I started going to that pastor’s church every time the doors were open, I started to learn about a new way. A way of faith…a way of trusting our Father to care for us, a way of not stealing and not tricking and not hiding.  I worked so hard to trust the Lord to take care of me, and it wasn’t long before the pastor, realizing how dark my situation at home was, offered me a place to stay at the church.  I’ve lived in our church ever since, and I work all I can with the pastor and for anyone who needs help, and the people of the church help care for me, too. 

I’m so thankful for my pastor who took me under his wing, started discipling me and taking me with him whenever he would go to minister to families or to preach somewhere. A few years ago he started sending me to do follow up, sometimes to preach or lead Bible studies in certain places, and he and I both felt that I have a call to ministry and wanted myself to get some Biblical training!

I went to a few different schools, but didn’t like a lot of what I was seeing that seemed contrary to what I was reading in the Bible.  I kept seeing a sign on the road for Emmaus, and started asking people about it.  I didn’t hear anything about the school, but a lot of people started telling me about students they knew from Emmaus, and from the stories of these men and women’s lives and ministries, I knew that was where I wanted to be a student, too.  

I started as a student in January, 2019, and I have such a burden for the great value of people’s souls to God.  I want to be teaching people, like my family, like so many people who do not know any truth at all, any different way.

Now, I live at Emmaus full time because my church is too far to go on weekends.  On Christmas and summer vacations, I rejoin my pastor.

My favorite part of life at Emmaus is the chapel services.  As I am hearing the Word in many different ways and from many different people, I can truly sense again and again that what I am hearing is TRUE.  It’s so different than what I grew up hearing, what I thought was true.  I’m glad His truth is altogether different.  

Please pray for me, that I would be truly attached to Christ and hanging on His words. Pray for my family that they would come to know Jesus.

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