Sunday was a great day for making connections with the people of Honduras.
We woke up @ the mission house this morning after a good nights rest. Had a wonderful breakfast of bacon & eggs. It was a nice and easy Sunday morning for sitting together and drinking some excellent Honduran coffee.. We attended church @ 10 am upstairs from where we slept. The pastor and the worship team were kind enough to do the service in English and Spanish. One of the scriptures was John 6:51-58. Jesus says that we have to eat his flesh and drink his blood if we want to have eternal life. As I listened, the thought struck me, “What do I consume?” If not Jesus, than what am I consuming. I consume so much food, and drink, and Netflix and eating out and sports and entertainment and vacation. All of these things are meant to fill me up, and they do, for a while, but eventually they all just leave me empty.
Last night @ our devotion, Scott shared a quote, “We are no more fully alive than when we are riding the wave of adventure.” And over the years he has pursued the promise of that quote but taking some fun trips and pursuing some difficult athletic challenges. All in the hopes of creating some sort of feeling. I have been on some of those adventures with Scott, and they were fun. But this trip is about something else. Something that won’t just eventually leave us feeling empty. This trip feels like we are trying to empty ourselves out, rather than just fill ourselves up with the next sugar high of adventure. Empty ourselves out so that we might be filled with something that we last forever.
After Church we traveled to Danli, which is about a 2 hour drive from Tegucigalpa. We are staying @ the Granada hotel which has all the comforts of home. Hot showers, great AC, fast wifi. So much for roughing it. After we checked in we took a hike up to the Danli Cross with some of the young men of El Obraje. We will be working with them over the next few days with our construction project. The hike had us huffing and puffing in no time. The hike has the stations of the cross on the way up, which besides the spiritual message, gave us a sense of how much further we had to climb. When we got to the top we took some pictures and pastor Alejandro read some scriptures and prayed a blessing over us and our work over the next few days.
When we got back we had dinner. Dinner by Carlos. Carlos is a well known chef in Danli and came out of retirement to cook for us this week. We are having all of our meals brought to the hotel because of the pandemic. Mark arranged the seating so that we could all get to know some of the young men of El Obraje. We talked about School, sports, families, religion & covid. It is amazing to be reminded that people are people whereever we go.
Tomorrow we are up @ 7 to start our construction project.
-Tim Merchant, Team Blogger