Mike and Karen Wyatt and their friend Brandon Patterson of Gatlinburg came back from Haiti with more stories than they can possibly tell in a two-hour presentation, but they offered up the highlights of their mission trip recently at the Shagbark Club House.

The Wyatts traveled to Haiti less than a week after the 7.0 earthquake struck the nation on Jan. 12, traveling to a place military veteran Mike had been told many times before to avoid. But after the earthquake, both he and his wife of 43 years could not ignore the call to spread God’s word. Patterson followed soon after.

“The way I got there, I was having devotions the morning after the earthquake,” Mike said. “I’m not quick to go anywhere, because I’ve had offers to go different places in the world — Africa three times and Israel and different places — and unless God tells me to go, I’m not going to go.

“So that morning it was clear. He said, ‘Mike, go to Haiti.’ And my background in the Army, I was put on alert to go to Haiti three times in the early days when they had the civil unrest and…all the fighting was going on. I would go over to special operations center at Fort Bragg and they would give us briefings and said whatever you do, don’t ever go to Haiti because it’s just a bad place. The last place on earth you ever want to go is Haiti. So my brain said don’t go to Haiti But that morning, when I got up, God said go to Haiti, and I heeded it.

“So I came out of the back room and Karen was having her devotion and I said, ‘Honey, God just told me to go to Haiti.’ She said, ‘Well, that’s kind of funny because God was putting on my heart to go too.”

Karen said she had been looking back on past devotions and words “God has given us through the years” before Mike came out and told of her revelation.

“It had been a couple of years since I’d read them and there was something in there about ministering to the poor and I was like, wow, Lord. But when you get a word, you don’t run out and do it, but yet you don’t wait for God to do it. You wait for the time and then you walk together.”

She didn’t have to wait long.

“Mike walked in a few minutes after that and when I heard him say it, I knew,” she said.

The next morning she asked God for another word. “Give me a word to stand on,” she asked him. “I want a word from the word, and so I hadn’t looked at this devotion in over a year. I’ll just look at it and it will get me focused on where I need to look in the word and start meditating. I open it up, January the 14th, and it says Isaiah 6, ‘Here my lord, send me.’ Oh my gosh. I just started crying.”

But making the decision to go and getting there were two different things. They started by going with what was familiar to them.

The Wyatts’ two daughters, Melissa and Michelle, both served with Youth With A Mission (YWAM), an international Christian organization that responds to crises. Melissa received discipleship training through the program, and Michelle served for three years on the Mercy Ship.

“YWAM has different organizations,” Mike said. “They have Mercy Works, Mercy Trucks, Mercy Ships. We didn’t know exactly how we were going to get there, so we contacted Mercy Works in Tyler, Texas.”

They were told then that the organization didn’t know then who they were sending to Haiti or even when they would go. The Wyatts were told to fill out an application.

“This was like Thursday,” he said. “Friday they called and said, can you leave on Sunday? And we hadn’t even finished our application.”

Before that call came in, the couple made their way to the health department to get vaccinations. At first they were told the department couldn’t get to them for two weeks, but Karen convinced them they needed the shots much sooner.

“I said we’re going this weekend,” Karen said.

“She didn’t meant to, like, tell a story,” her husband said. “It was a fact; she just didn’t know it was a fact yet. They took us in and they gave us the shots and we ended up going to Haiti.”

Meanwhile, Patterson had also made the decision to go.

“As soon as the earthquake happened and we heard about, I looked at (my wife) Brenda and she was like, I know you want to go, right?” Patterson said.

Two days later he saw on Facebook how the Wyatts were preparing to go down there.

“I thought, OK Lord, what’s going on here? Because I don’t know if you guys know the history I have with Mike is basically he’s mentored me for five years. Five years we trained to do things like that, so that’s exactly what God spoke to me when I heard that they were going, you are supposed to be there with them, assist them and help them and be there to work with them out in the field, out in the world. I knew right then that I was supposed to go.”

Like the Wyatts, he had to find a way to get there. Familiar with YWAM and after speaking with Mike, Patterson contacted Mercy Works and asked if they could use more help. He was told they were needing mostly medical teams. He told them he could be of assistance in aiding the Wyatts and providing help in administration and logistics.

“That’s what I did for five years, is do that with Mike, right side by side with him every day,” he said. “So to them, the usage that I could offer basically is that I could assist Mike and overlap them, staying to help after he leaves.”

Patterson wasn’t left with much hope that Mercy Works could use him, hearing again they were needing mostly medical help. He was asked to fill out an application and wait for word.

“I went to the Anna Porter library and faxed it to Tyler, Texas, and as I was leaving the library I got a phone call from Tyler, Texas,” he said. They asked him on that Wednesday if he could leave on Monday. That gave him two days to work on getting donations to help pay for the trip and collecting supplies to take to the Wyatts.

“I was excited when I heard Brandon was coming,” Mike said.

“That was a godsend,” Karen added. “He sent somebody we knew and loved to come down there.”’

gcrutchfield@themountainpress.com