Co-Laboring With JesusExemplo

When a catastrophic earthquake hit Haiti in January 2010, thousands of doctors from around the world rushed to the nation’s capital of Port-Au-Prince to render aid to the injured and comfort to the dying. Dr. Dave Holson was one of those doctors. As an emergency room physician in New York City, he knew he possessed the requisite skills, so he did not hesitate to go. 

As days turned into weeks, Dr. Holson noticed that the same group of three boys returned to hang out every day by the entrance to the clinic where he worked. One day he asked them: “Why do you come here every day instead of going to school?” Their response saddened him: “Our parents do not have the money to pay the fees.” As a result, the boys spent their days chatting and loitering around the clinic as they watched the steady stream of patients entering and leaving through the front door. Their hopelessness was palpable.

When it was time to return to New York, Dr. Holson decided to fix what he had seen. He gave money to a local missionary whom he had befriended and asked him to see to it that the three boys were enrolled in school. Dr. Holson’s gift paid for the boys’ school fees, uniforms, and supplies. In the months that followed, other boys in the community learned about Dr. Holson’s generosity and they too sought his assistance. Soon Dr. Holson became the sponsor for a dozen adolescent boys. 

Have you ever felt as if you have done enough? That you are physically drained and cannot do a single thing more for anyone else? Dr. Holson was certainly entitled to feel that way. He had heeded Jesus’s call to disrupt his medical practice in the United States to travel to Haiti to provide life-saving medical care to thousands under extremely desperate circumstances. Yet, when Jesus asked him to extend himself on behalf of three boys, he agreed to be a co-laborer with him and help secure for the boys an education and a future. Dr. Holson’s ears were opened to hear Jesus’s voice, his heart was tender to Jesus’s touch, and his hands were willing to do as Jesus instructed.  

Dr. Holson’s act of obedience would ultimately lead to the creation of a non-profit organization called the Ageno Foundation International, which today provides a high-quality secondary school and university education to dozens of young men and women in Haiti. Participants also receive biblical instruction, participate in weekly “Praise and Worship” services, and learn about Jesus through regular bible-based preaching. Minds and hearts, and bodies and souls, are being refreshed and repaired because Dr. Holson responded to the call to become Jesus’s co-laborer in a Haitian community and did not draw back, believing he had already done “enough.”