Emulate the faith of Eva the cab driver
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One morning when I hailed an airport cab in Miami, I looked forward to 25 minutes of staring out the window.
"Good morning!" the driver said with a broad smile and cheery voice. It took me a minute to process her good mood. No taxi driver had ever exhibited such joy upon my entrance.
Eva was a 55 year-old Haitian with long dreadlocks and a thick accent. When she talked to the taxi company's home base, it sounded like she spoke French laced with Island dialect.
I found it hard to believe that her daughter hated her, but that's how Eva began her life story as she pulled into traffic.
After her own "mom-mom" had died 13 years earlier, Eva felt little desire to visit the cemetery. She intensified her smoking habit and went through two cartons of Newports every day. One morning she had the distinct premonition that she would die soon herself.
She cried out to God to break her addiction before it buried her. "God, if you save me, I will serve you!"
During that night's fitful sleep, she said a "big voice" spoke to her. She knew it was God. He asked her if she remembered what she had done the day before. She didn't. The agitated dreaming resumed, now peppered with confusion.
The next day delivered more depression and smoke. Then, she said, it was as if someone grabbed the back of her head and forced her to fall back asleep.
This time the voice filled her dream with power and clarity. He told her she couldn't remember what she'd done the day before because of how she was living. He said he would save her from that addiction and indeed use her life in his service.
Her joy overflowed as she explained to me how he had used her since that day.
"I speak about him on the streets. Sometimes I don't know what to say. He speaks through me." Eva said every year she goes home to Haiti to share Jesus with people in the villages near her old home, in the midst of a sea of voodoo. One time there were about 300 people in the crowd, and more than half of them responded positively to her message.
"People come up to me afterward and say they want to know this God I talk about. But when that happens, I am amazed, because I don't remember what I said! God's words flow through me, and sometimes I don't understand them."
We didn't have time to talk about her church upbringing, and I didn't sense there was any formal theological training in her background.
But there was joy and power.
And a faith that humbled me.
Excerpted from Servant Leader Strong: Uniting Biblical Wisdom and High-Performance Leadership, by Tom Harper (DeepWater Books, 2019). Also available in Spanish and Amharic.
 | Tom Harper is publisher of BiblicalLeadership.com and executive chairman of Networld Media Group, a business-to-business publisher and event producer. He has written five books, including Servant Leader Strong: Uniting Biblical Wisdom and High-Performance Leadership (DeepWater Books, 2019) as well as the Christian business fable Through Colored Glasses and its sequel Inner Threat (DeepWater, 2022). Learn More » |
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