The Detour That Built a Church

In 2014, Pastor Marcus Rivera planned a mission trip to Port-au-Prince, Haiti. His team of twelve from a small church in Durham, North Carolina, had raised funds for months. Three days before departure, a hurricane warning shut down their route. Marcus was devastated.

A colleague suggested they redirect their efforts to a migrant farmworker community in rural Sampson County, just ninety minutes south. Marcus resisted — this wasn't the plan. But something stirred in him, a quiet insistence he couldn't shake. He loaded the van.

They arrived at a dusty clearing where workers gathered on Sunday mornings under a rusted pavilion. A woman named Rosa Gutierrez had been organizing informal prayer meetings there for two years, waiting — she told Marcus later — for God to send someone who could help them build something lasting. She wept when the van pulled up.

That weekend, Marcus's team poured a concrete floor, hung lights, and held their first bilingual service together. Rosa's prayer group became Iglesia de la Cosecha — Church of the Harvest — which now serves three hundred families across two counties.

Paul had his eyes set on Asia, but the Spirit sent him to Macedonia instead. There, by a river, he found Lydia — someone whose heart the Lord had already been preparing. God's detours are not delays. Sometimes the place you never planned to go is exactly where someone has been praying for you to arrive.