“In America people believe in God, in Honduras people depend on God.”
It’s been a week since we left Nicaragua for Tegucigalpa, Honduras. We have been sleeping in our tents inside a church on top of a mountain overlooking the city. The church has four cement walls and floor with a tin roof that rattles and clangs on windy nights. At night the metal gate is locked with a padlock and a guard sleeps in a room nearby. In the morning school starts at eight in the two classrooms outside of the church and a daycare down by our bathroom.
Our first week of ministry we prepared a meal of spaghetti with homemade sauce, white rice and a woman from the community made tortillas. We plated over fifty meals that morning, wrapped them in plastic, piled them in a box and put them in the back of a pick up truck. We drove thirty minutes that day to the top of the city trash dump, loaded with the meals we prepared to pass out to the people at the top. People who live there, people who earn a living there, people whose life revolves around the daily unloading of trash from trash trucks brought there from dumpsters around the city. What are they looking for? Why are they doing this? Bottles, cardboard, plastic, rubber, food. These are some items that they can collect and return for money.
We drove our pick up truck into the middle of the dump and by the time the truck was put into park we were surrounded by people in long pants, hoodies, and hats. The men with us moved in front of us “gringas” as one of my teammates stood in front to share a message. A message of how God sent His Son to love the world, not to condemn the world. A message of God’s love and grace. After the message I was able to pray over the food before handing it out. Two lines were formed and the meals started to fly out our hands along with a single phrase “Dios te Bendiga” meaning God Bless you.
The bustling of people, the commotion of vultures and dogs, bulldozers and dump trucks unloading more and more trash. These were some of the sites we saw. Yet in the midst of all of this we also saw a church. Pure treasure found amidst a trash dump. A church made of no more than tarp and wood. Recycled items found, I’d safely assume, at the trash dump. Judah Smith states in one of his sermons, “Where your treasure is, that’s where your heart will be also. You are not subject to your desires, treasure trumps your desires.”
In the midst of all this, we saw people depending on God. People whose treasure is in the church. If God is your treasure then He will fulfill all your desires, not the other way around.
What is your treasure?
