So, I’m going to be honest for a sec. Because of my passion with human trafficking and orphanages, my heart has definitely been with Asia and Africa. Sure, I thought Central America would be cool since I’ve never been here, but I really wasn’t anticipating too much to really happen. Well, I was most definitely wrong, because here I am just two weeks into the race and my heart has already been completely wrecked…
Our ministry contact here in Puerto Barrios has several different community connections so my team can pretty much be doing anything on any given day. So far this month my team has visited the bar district, a port area, the local orphanage and the landfill where some families live in. There have definitely been moments were the heaviness of oppression has totally overcome me.
The other day I had this heavy unsettledness that wouldn’t go away. No matter what I did, I just couldn’t shake it. Later that night I sat there thinking about the images I had recently seen…
The bar district where people were breaking down in front of us, desperate for freedom.
The houses in the landfill that were infiltrated by the smoke of burning garbage.
The orphanage where my heart was stolen by handicapped little boy named Julius Caesar.
It was as if the floodgates of my soul opened up. I was cut to the core and I literally could not stop sobbing. I seriously don’t remember the last time I cried that hard for that long. How could all this happen?! I mean, I had read the things that my kids had gone through in their case files. And I had heard their pain as I helped them pick up the broken pieces of their lives. I tried to understand it all as I helped them over the past five years, but there is something totally different about being immersed in it day after day, sometimes even hour after hour.
It was seriously about all I could handle. But it was in that moment I realized to just how broken our world is. And as this mother’s heartbeat that God has given me started to come alive for the first time on the WR, I finally started to truly understand a little of how God’s heart breaks for His precious children.
As I’ve been processing all this, I was reminded of the prophecy spoken over me at a conference last year… about how God wanted to give me the nations. Whenever I’d think about it before I thought it was cool, but know after just being on the WR for about two weeks I WANT this more than ever. I want this mother’s heart that God has cultivated in my previous years of foster parenting to boldly go out to the nations and pour out His love over the broken generations. And while doing so I hope that this can ultimately become my prayer…
Show me how to love like you have loved me…
-Hosanna
