It was 18 hours on a bus, 6 Dramamine, 2 boarder crossings and a lot of prayer until we safely made it into the country of Honduras. We were greeted into the country with colorful homes on the hillside, dry heat and- do my eyes deceive me- a Forever 21 store shining like a beacon of hope (and maybe a couple new pairs of shorts) Praise The Lord indeed! The 50 of us, bleary eyes and half concious, slowly came off the bus waiting for our contacts or a new bus to come pick us up to take us to our ministry sights.
That’s when our team of 7 ran into Gracie Murphree.
“You’re going where?!” She said, her eyes in complete shock and dispair
“Los Andes” we responded “we have a hotel there”
“You’re not going there,” she responded “Especially not during Holy Week, you can all be in serious danger, you’re coming with me.”
I should probably back up a little here. My team and I are in a month called Unsung Heroes, where we will be traveling all over Honduras looking for potential new ministries that Adventures in Missions can partner with to send future missionaries to. Our job is to ask The Holy Spirit where we need to go, meet and network with potential contacts and go out to meet them for an interview. This month requires a lot of planning, a lot of traveling and a lot of trusting where The Lord is sending us. We are not assigned a ministry, we will jump from place to place and we’ll be spending a lot of quality time on busses.
So we found ourselves at Gracie’s, where she owns a small compound and runs a ministry called Heart of Christ. Gracie is one of a kind, her and her husband moved to Honduras from The States 10 years ago because she felt that’s where The Lord was calling them. 10 years later, she now runs the only safe place in Honduras where babies born of rape and incest victims can come live and get a second chance at life. The stories she shares about her kids are utterly horrific, girls beaten and raped every night. Girls pregnant by 11 years old. Girls who turned to living on the streets because it was better than living in their home, girls who had no place to go.
“When you look at my babies though,” she said to us one morning “Don’t look at the pain and suffering they has to go through, look at the beauty of what’s to come for them.”
Did I mention she knows every ministry contact in Honduras? Which makes our job of hunting down ministries so much easier, talk about favor. Before we knew it, we had another safe place to stay in the next week, a place where we could get internet, and an overwhelming number of new ministries to check out, and all it took was a little networking and a whole lot of Jesus.
There’s a lot of adventure taking place this next month and there will be ministries that will leave a lasting imprint on my heart, like Gracie and her kids. I don’t know what to except or where we’ll be lead, all I know is that we are willing. The beauty of The World Race is that with every month is a new learning experience, and with every new learning experience is new opportunities, and with new opportunities comes new ways to see The Lord.
I see God in the details. I see Him when He answers the little prayers, the ones we didn’t see worthy enough to pray for. How mistaken we are to think that our God doesn’t care about the details of our lives, that He doesn’t see the small. Yes, our God is big, but He’s in the thread of our lives, He puts us together and creates something beautiful.
Off to buy some new shorts-
M
Sent from my Verizon Wireless 4G LTE Tablet
