Partnering PWM to prepare for a dedication dinner!

I am finally able to update the blog for Honduras!!!  The first picture shows Israel talking to the team right outside the medical clinic.  It is so amazingly great!  The entire team was so impressed at how Providence World Ministries and doing everything to glorify God!  We worked very hard to assists the staff in making the dedication for the Dining Hall beautiful.  It was easy to do with the local help:  the hotel we were staying at let us borrow table cloths and toppers in assorted bright colors and the floral farm was right next door!  The greatest highlight was the black and white photos displayed of the Providence Children!  Angela and Camille Thompson are pictured with the flowers and they were two of several right hand gals!  Dedicating the building was honoring to the Lord and we are excited for the use of this building in the future.  It will be a place where the Providence Children (they are no longer called orphans once they are placed in a home) will be able to have school, eat two meals a day, learn music and theater and have fun and games.  God must have been smiling as we opened in prayer and as we listened to the children sing a song!

Welcome to Honduras!

I am in Honduras this week and immediately after landing I was reminded of God's amazing love and provisions.  One of the pictures shows a view of Honduras as we drove from San Pedro to Siguetepeque (a two hour drive).  It is an amazingly beautiful sight driving through a rain forest, banana plantations, coffee plantations, villages and more!  The coolest part of getting to discover the beauty here that God created is that the people here are just as beautiful inside and outside.  They have a wonderful culture here that we can all learn from.  It seems their "slower" way of life is the life that we Americans dream of.  Their priorities are most definitely in better check than my own.    

Heal Ministries will be partnering with Providence World Ministries by assisting them with teams that will assists them in needs.  The team arrived today from Nashville and after spending a week at the hotel by myself, I was MOST excited to greet them!  There are 20 of us in all and they came to build the first playground for the site.  I came a week early to assists them with the dedication of a building that you will see in the next day or two.  The dedication dinner and celebration will be all day Saturday, March 14th and it is a most exciting event;  a celebration of God's provisions.  The home above is the first orphan home.  PWM has the best family model for orphan care in the world.  The home pictured will house a set of parents and 8 children.  The children will grow up in this community with 24 homes eventually and 196 orphans.  Of course, the beauty of this program is that they will grow up in a loving home with a set of parents and will also be assigned to a widow in the church that will be their grandmother.  One of the stages of the family model plan has a widows' cottage housing 2 grandmothers per cottage on site.  This fullfills James 1:27 which is the verse that Heal Ministries was based on.  

Pictured to the right is the first family to live on site.  Walmer is the dad and three of the beautiful children are pictured on the steps with him.  As I gaze at the children that they love as their very own, I am amazed again at God's provisions.  The beauty of the unconditional love that our Lord has is most expressed through the love revealed by those accepting of orphans.  

I was able to drive to Tegucigalpa with Douglas, PWM staff, to purchase some things for the dedication dinner and he drove me through several areas:  some influential areas as well as some areas that are not so influential.  As we drove through the poorer section of Tegucigalpa, I realized how similar it looked to places that I have visited such as Kibera in Africa (one of the largest slums in Kenya) or remote villages in Ukraine.  People are the same everywhere:  we all want love and relationships and we all have problems and we all need Jesus.  Fortunately, we all get Jesus anytime if we want Him.  Thanks for tuning in!!  I'll be posting pictures the next two weeks as we begin the project for La Provencia and as I head to El Salvador after the team departs to visit two orphanages there.  Blessings to you all!

Ukraine is a country that Heal Ministries visits a couple of times a year. The people are so beautiful and they have such a difficult past to comprehend. My first visit to Ukrain was overwhelming. It is very hard to grasp the conditions of their past. I became friends with a lady that walked me through the history museum and to hear from the words of the horrible past of communism coming from someone that can remember many of the events as a little girl was hard to take in. When communism fell, it left many families without anything. Because of this, many women were abandoned and left to figure things out on their own: men resorted to drugs and alcohol because they could not deal with the reality of their gray world. It also resulted in a nation of the homeless with thousands of street kids. Today, Ukraine is free and rebuilding. Heal Ministries will partner will MDI and Radooga Ministries to send orphans to summer camps because many orphanages close down in the summer. Often, the orphans do have anywhere to go. We will also be partnering with MDI to provide sanitary needs for the female orphans in an orphanage in Odessa. The project will be called Paper to Paper and we are asking everyone to give just one dollar: everyone working together and giving to make someone else's tomorrow better! Pray for the next generation to rise up with Hope from above in Ukraine. Our team went to assist with a summer English speaking camp. We had recreation, fun and games, morning praise and worship and skits, English classes, drama teams, and a night time Boom concert that was crazy! The last night was repentance night and we witnessed over 200 kids accepting Christ! It was a beautiful picture of redemption in the Ukraine! Our American Team was amazing: the ukrainians responded to their praise and worship and the language barriers were not a problem because the friendships created were forever in our hearts.

Mac Kelton is pictured with me above. The next picture shows the pastor of the Unity Christian Church that we worked with while in Belize City. His name is Earnest, and his beautiful daughter is Nikki. Earnest is such a complete picture of the love and joy that comes from Christ. When we were on our way to visit Corozal, I was driving slowly (ha) and had a flat. We prayed and a man stopped with the exact tool that we needed to change the flat on our van. He is pictured with me and his daughter and through the daughter's translation, realized that God brought us together! Hisname is Victor an he is a pastor of a church in Orange Walk. This pastor has been praying about meeting an American team that would be interested in working with a church and street kids! I am going to visit him in May of this year and look forward to seeing what God's plans are. Part of our team is pictured above and their beautiful smiles that are captured in this great picture depict their attitudes and joyful hearts while in Belize.

These are pictures from the 08 Belize mission trip. The team is standing on the front steps of the preschool that we worked on for a week. We loved the Belizean construction workers and two goals were accomplished. The team made the goals of : being different and being changed spiritually. At the end of the week, the supervisor told me that our team was different and every team member was forever changed. We grew closer to each other, closer to God, and closer to realizing that we are all equal. God used this trip to break barriers and to tear down walls for all of us personally. God stripped away prejudice and judegemental opinions and made us see all people through the eyes of Jesus. The colorful fruits and vegetables were a small glimpse into the colorful hearts of the people that lived there. The school pictured above with the concrete workers gives a glimpse into the kind of work that we did. We had a couple of youth nights and Matt King and Tripp Weir are pictured above during praise and worship. Belize is a precious and beautiful place and I am thankful for the relationships that are building with the Unity Christian Church and the Belize Project founded by Mac Kelton.

The story of Heal Ministries begins after Abby and Ericka and picks up in the Havanna slum in Nairobi, Kenya. Larry Warren (pictured with me and a Kikuyu lady below posing after the church dedication day) kept stressing to me something that I finally got when seeing this abandoned mom to the left with her two little boys. The only difference between me and her: our birthplace. God gave me a glimpse of my past with my two little boys, making me aware of how blessed I am. She lives in the middle of the slum with the sewage running through her home and she has nobody to help her. In America, we are blessed with family, friends, church community and more. We are called to help those that cannot help themselves. James 1:27 is the first verse that God used to form this ministry. God views this as pure religion: to look after the orphans and widows in their distress. Sometimes we are able to help others that have similar circumstances. This is what God has called me to do with Heal Ministries: to embrace orphans and widows all over the world and to partner with other ministries, organizations and the church bringing about awareness of those we are called to serve. We can offer the hope of Jesus Christ. While the biggest difference between the lady pictured in the slum (with her two little boys) and me is only the place of birth: the biggest similarity between me and her is that we both need Jesus. Larry and Mary Warren are the founders of African Leadership and I am honored to call them friends and thankful for the time invested in me. They have been a huge inspiration and encourager of Heal Ministries. Please look on their website to find out about all the needs in Africa.