Recently, I was asked to give a chapel talk to the students at Atlantic Union College (AUC)—the first chapel for the second semester. As the students gathered together, beyond the usual bustle of college kids’ brisk activity, the reminder that second semester is the beginning of the end of another school year, and the inevitability of another graduation, there was something else.

You see, I was invited not only to give a chapel talk but also to share the latest update on the situation in Haiti due to the massive earthquake on January 12 and what was being done by the Adventist Church to bring relief. So there was sadness in the air. There was sadness in the world. The television screen still screams with pictures of the dead, the dying, and suffering in Haiti in the aftermath of one of the largest and deadliest earthquakes to hit the Western hemisphere. As of this printing, there are still untold numbers of family members, church members and workers, and friends of the Haitian Adventist family community that remain unaccounted for. I urge you, please continue to pray for and donate funds to help the people of Haiti.

Well, I shared with the students, faculty, and staff who nearly filled the College Church (on the campus of AUC) some of the ways the Seventh-day Adventist Church, including the Atlantic Union, was helping in the emergency. For example, I spoke of the teams from New York City, from both the Greater New York and Northeastern conferences, that had already left for Haiti, the pledge of financial support from the Atlantic Union, as well as all the unions in North America and the world church, the special union-wide offering, and the union-wide day of prayer.

But most of all, I reminded them of a favorite passage of Scripture taken from Romans 8: 35-39 (NKJV) in which the Apostle Paul, who was no stranger to suffering and hardships, wrote: “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written: ‘For Your sake we are killed all day long; We are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.’ Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.”

I’ll never forget the scene as I watched on CNN the ordeal of that female bank employee trapped under the rubble of her collapsed bank. But her husband refused to give up. He kept searching the mound of debris, calling, calling, till he heard her voice. They stuck a snaked camera inside the rubble—and sure enough, they found her, still alive after a whole week! When they pulled her from the rubble, she came out singing and praising God and telling her husband how much she loved him! I believe that lady understood in a practical way the meaning of Romans 8.

My friends, God has called us to a momentous task in the midst of extremely challenging times. Let us be faithful knowing that “in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.”

Donald G. King is president of the Atlantic Union Conference and chairman of the Atlantic Union College Board of Trustees.