How Deep

My team and team Transformed are working together this month, and we located at a farm about half an hour outside the city, up a windy mountain road (we’re only about 5000 feet up, if that, but it’s still mountainous) that is absolutely astounding. 120 acres of hills and trees has been set aside for God’s work here (it looks and feels a lot like Montana, if you could grow bananas and mangos there) and the view is astounding. Pictures hopefully soon – but before I start bragging too much about our physical location, I have to tell you about the people we’re working with.

Tony is our contact this month, the guy in charge of the farm. He’s got a beautiful wife, Nidia, and the two of them are living out here in the place they call “El Eden”. They don’t have any children of their own yet, but they’re never alone out here – Tony is committed to ministering to the people of Los Pinos and they always have a few of the boys living with them. Los Pinos is the third most dangerous place in all of Central America, with drugs and violence that makes even local people from other regions of Tegucigalpa afraid to visit. Tony has been working in Honduras for 5 years, 3 of them in Los Pinos. He’s invested his entire life in his ministry to the region. Ministry is really too limiting a word to use to describe what he does here – it’s only ‘ministry’ in the sense that Jesus’ whole life was a ‘ministry’ – because he lives out God’s love for the people he works with without a single break. He desires to establish relationships with the people in Los Pinos and the other areas he visits as part of his work here, despite the incredibly dangerous region he’s in. He’s persisted through hardships and spiritual assault – he lost his previous work here, a breakfast program he was doing on his own for the local children, after the pastor of his sponsor church received a death threat – and you can see the love in his eyes and hear the passion in his voice when he talks about the boys he’s been working with for two years. I wish I could introduce them to you in person: the most lost and hopeless young men you could ever meet, transformed by the power of the Father’s love living and active in Tony.

Here’s Henry. He turns 18 tomorrow. When Tony met him two years ago, he was a wreck – drinking and smoking and completely undesirable to society. Tony had multiple people tell him that there was no hope for Henry, that the boy should be institutionalized, that there was no point in trying to change his life. Tony didn’t care. He kept working with Henry, loving him, relentlessly pursuing a relationship with him, and today Henry has a room on the farm where he lives. He’s going to school – he hasn’t missed a day since he started again – and does chores around the farm. He’s one of the most polite, friendly, and responsible 18-year-old boys I’ve ever met – and two months ago he committed his life to Jesus. I’m crying as I write this to think how many other people just like Henry might have been changed so radically if there were more people like Tony and fewer people like those who couldn’t see past his problems. Tony isn’t interested in the easy work, the ‘fields ripe for the harvest’ that so many people want to go to – he’s out digging around in the barren fields, praying that God would lead him to fertile ground in one soul to plant and nurture God’s love.

I’ll have more stories of the young men Tony’s reaching out to in Los Pinos – so many of them are incredible testimonies of God’s love – but for now I want to just give you a name: Cristofer. We’ve all been asked by Tony to show extra special love to this young man this month, so please even before I get his story posted here pray that our time here will be full of the Father’s love and that God will work through us to soften Cristofer’s heart to the message God is whispering to his soul.

Stay tuned – there’s a lot I want to share with you all this month!