Quiero Cambiar

Hello All,
This may very well be the last post that I make from Honduras as I´m leaving La Esperanza today, and I may not take the time to go to the internet when I´m in Tegus. I will, however, give you the final update on how it all wrapped up whenever I get back to the States. And, I think I am going to continue blogging this school year for anyone who would like to read. There are going to be lots of preparations (both physical and spiritual) for moving to Honduras, and perhaps, some of those adventures will be worth reading. At any rate, I am very thankful for all of you who read and share in the adventure with me.

It has been a long week. We went to Chiligatoro on Friday to say goodbye to our students, take pictures, and watch La India Bonita which is essentially a school beauty pageant celebrated their indigenous identity. It was very interesting. Our children gave us lots of hugs and asked us when we´d be returning. I will miss my students very much.

Friday night was pretty crazy. I spent a lot of the evening with Jorge just visiting. He is such a fantastic kid, and I am so grateful to have his friendship. He has been a bit of a comfort for me as I feel that he understands me fairly well, and we have a lot in common. Friday night was the big party for the Arabe soccer team, and it essentially consisted of two giant DJ set ups right outside of our house in the street with tons of drunk people mingling and dancing. Pretty unbelievable. It was also pouring down the rain the entire time. There is all kinds of dramatic things I could share, but the long story short version is that one of the soccer players got in a fight with a drunk guy trying to rescue a volunteer who was being harrassed, and he got hit in the back of the head with something, cutting his head open a bit. It wasn´t too terrible although it did seem to me that it needed stitches. The man works at the hospital, though, and he didn´t want to go due to fear of needles or something. Thus, some other soccer players, volunteers, and I all did our best to doctor him up. It was amusing, and I greatly appreciated my mother´s willingness to go into Nurse Kimmie mode at 3 AM by telephone, talking me through how to make a butterfly out of hot pink duct tape. Never a dull moment in Honduras. We stayed with him and monitored him until 5 in the morning, and I did not sleep at all.

I was utterly exhausted, and through some of the circumstances here, I have come to once again realize what a work in progress I am. God showed me before I came to Honduras that He would be teaching me how to share with others, how to lose it all for others, and He has indeed been teaching me that. It is quite difficult at times and leaves me drained and tearful, longing only for His grace. He has definitely been teaching me to want something better--just Him and His will. At any rate, while I absolutely love all of the people here, and there is a very special place in my heart for La Esperanza and Chiligatoro, I am ready to go back to Tegus. But there is a part of me that I believe will always been attached to La Esperanza, and I don´t know what God has in store with that--it is merely something that I am offering up to Him. Perhaps, He only led me here so that I would pray for the town and people here. Perhaps, He has other purposes in mind. At any rate, it was not an accident, and I only want to be obedient in any case.

Yesterday, I went to Jorge´s game (he made a penalty kick goal!) and got rather sunburnt. I am going to have a gorgeous flip-flop tan--likely my only proof that I actually got some sun. Then I mainly spent the rest of the afternoon with the family while the volunteers went to a tourist area with some of the soccer boys. I enjoyed the time with Dercia, the kids, and Jorge. Jorge and I visited for a long time while he was doing homework. He is such an amazing kid, a very diligent student, and such a ridiculous perfectionist! I am going to miss him very much, but I look forward to when we can visit when he goes to university in Tegus to study medicine, and I live in Tegus.

Last night was also very blessed as God was so present in some of the things that happened. As I believe I may have mentioned before, we volunteers like to visit with the neighborhood boys--all of whom are cousins of the family we live with. They are rough around the edges in many cases. A lot of them drink, and sometimes, talking to them can be quite interesting, but they have become quite precious to me. I have a tendency of adopting brothers, especially guys that have rough lives or that go through difficulties, and my dad calls these guys my ´´lost boys.´´ These guys have definitely become some of my lost boys. Although I´m not very close to any of them, they have all become to important to me. Last night, they were drinking while we were visiting with them, and one guy who was drunk--Alexander--who I have rarely talked to before, started talking to me. These guys know that I am different. Jorge and Henry, one of the soccer players here, both have told me that it was very apparent to them that I am different. It´s not just that I don´t drink. They can see that I have sincere motivations of kindness with them. Jorge said that he has never met someone like me who tries so hard to operate out of love for other people rather than selfish intentions. Jorge told me that he will always remember my face and my smile because he has never met someone who always has a smile as I generally do. This is most definitely a God thing. He is my strength and my joy. He is the one that has made me who I am. Thus, He receives all the glory. At any rate, Alexander looked right at me and started talking to me directly telling me that he wanted to change.

Last week, we came across Alexander not only drunk but high on cocaine as well. These guys lead rough lives. A lot of them have grown up without mothers or fathers. A lot of them have grown up in homes plagued with alcoholism. Many of them have had children of their own since they were teenagers. They constantly are around drinking and adultery, and just from the way that they interact with me, I can tell that they must be lonely in their lives. There is never any stability, never any sincerity. It is normal for everyone to be unfaithful. It is normal to never be able to trust even your wife or closest friends. It is normal only to rely on diversion and substitutes and the obligation of family to get you through life. It is a tragic existence to me and one that has touched my heart with compassion and sorrow while I´ve been here.

Alexander kept saying, ´´Quiero cambiar. Quiero cambiar.´´ ´´I want to change. I want to change.´´ And as he looked me in the eyes, my heart just broke for him. His mom died this past year of cancer, and when she was on her death bed, he promised her that he would stop drinking. He held her hand and promised, and four days later, he was drinking again. He feels such guilt over that, and he wants better for his life. He told me that when he hears the songs trickling from the churches, he begins to cry every time. And I know that this is the Spirit of God working in his heart, sending him an invitation to have a real relationship with Him. Alexander kept saying, ´´I want something real, Sarah. I have my God, but I want to change.´´ The other guys were really giving him a hard time, saying, ´´If you want to change, just do it. Just stop drinking. Stop smoking. No one can change you but you.´´ But I kept looking at him straight in the eyes even as my own were full of tears, and I kept saying, ´´I understand. I understand you, Alexander.´´He kept talking about how he needed someone to take him by the hand, to take him to church, to take him to hear the word of God because he can´t do it himself. He feels shame around God and fears being judged in church. The others kept telling him that he shouldn´t need anyone else to help him change. But I just looked him in the eyes and again told him that I understand. And I do. We humans can only change by inviting God to change us. It is His work in our hearts; we cannot earn our salvation or will ourselves to truly change.

I asked Alexander to walk with me for a bit, just to get him away from the others, so that I could talk to him. One of the first things he said to me was, ´´Why haven´t we talked before, Sarah? This is the first time I´ve ever really talked to you. Why haven´t you told me how I could change before? Why haven´t we talked about God before?´´ I can´t explain the level of conviction that stirred in my heart. I will openly admit that I don´t know how to witness. I feel as if I have been through so many religious brainwashings that I don´t always know how to operate with a kingdom mindset of sharing His word with others as individuals rather than a quota to meet. I try to operate in love and show love diligently, but I am still learning how to be His voice. Please pray that He would lead me in learning how to witness.

I told Alexander that God was with us in that moment, that only God could work in his heart and change his life. I told him that the reason that God sent His Son, Jesus, was precisely because we cannot change ourselves. He listened intently, and I prayed for him. I told him that he could pray as well, simply telling God that he wanted God to change him. But, he refused. ´´Sarah, I´m drunk. I can´t come to God drunk. It´s not right.´´ And all I could tell him was that God loved him right where he was, that he didn´t need to change to come to God, that he could talk to God while in any condition in any moment. He said he knew that God loved him, and he told me a story about how he was almost hit by a car a couple days ago, and how he knows that God rescued him. He said he knows that God is with him because even though he is drinking or making bad decisions, he feels as if God has spared him numerous times when he should have died. He told me of his fear or death, and I explained that accepting Jesus and having a relationship with God means that we are rescued from death. We talked for a long while, and it was obvious to me that God is working on his heart. At the end of the conversation, he told me that he had faith that God was going to touch his heart to change him, and then, in the same sentence, he promised me that he would stop drinking. All I could tell him was that it was God´s work, that all he needed to do was received God´s grace. I gave him my e-mail and phone number so that he can contact me if he needs to, and I will continue to keep him in my prayers. I ask that you do the same.

Please also keep Nelson, Alexander´s brother in your prayers--he is 23 and has a daughter he is raising by himself. He works as a mortician, and he is so plagued by death and fear that he can never sleep at night. He is also the one whose head was cracked. Please also pray for Henry--he is also 23, and he was raised by his father. His mother has been in the US since he was 8-years-old. He is a precious person, but he struggles with the need for control and seems to operate out of force and fear, and all I can see in him is that he desperately wants something real. Please pray for Carlos, a policeman in San Pedro Sula who has become my friend. He does cocaine and marijuana. Please pray for Jorge--he is so important to me, and he is walking in a direction away from the vices of many of his peers which blesses me greatly. But he has also been through some difficulty. A result of an affair, he has been raised by his mother and aunts, and I believe that there is still a part of him that longs for the reality of a compassionate, ever-present Father.

It is very difficult for me to leave La Esperanza-so much more than I ever expected. I feel such an intense love and compassion for the people here, especially my lost boys, that I feel that leaving them is going to cause me to be very broken. But I am so grateful for all that God has shown me here at Calvary. I am greatful for all of the ways that I have died to self and all of the realizations of how much more of me needs to die. What I want more than anything is to be a pure vessel that can carry and overflow the love and message of Jesus to everyone around me. I want His will and His glory in all things.

And thus, it is off to Tegus. I have no idea what else God has in store for my last little bit of time here. I am already so overwhelmed by how much God has changed me just in the past few weeks here in La Esperanza. He is so loving and gracious with me, and I so desire to spread His love to others, including you. I hope that you feel His presence today wherever you are, and I pray that you would allow Him to delve deep into the recesses of your heart, that you would meet Him right where you are (no matter what your condition) and let Him love and purify you. His best is always better than ours even when it means the pain of dying to self.

Until next time,
Sarah