Reconnecting.....

Back from a two week stay in the States. At about day 2 I felt I was ready to go back 'home'....home?! Yup, up here in the rural mountains of Guatemala, I feel like I am home. How on earth did that happen? Life in the states looks so sterile and feels sterile. The only home we seem to find is with our faith community. And I suppose that is by God's design. We do miss fellowship on a larger scale. We are integrating little by little but at times I find it hard to listen ever so carefully, until my headaches at sermons or dialogue that run too fast. In time, I tell myself, in time.....And the spanish class goes on.
A scripture that has really stuck with Will and I is Isaiah 49:8-12 (from the "Message"):
"God also says: When the time's ripe, I answer you.
When victory's due, I help you.
I form you and use you
to reconnect the people with me,
To put the land in order,
to resettle families on the ruined properties.
I tell prisoners, 'Come on out. You're free!'
and those huddled in fear, "It's all right. It's safe now.'
There'll be foodstands along all the roads,
picnics on all the hills-
Nobody hungry, nobody thirsty,
shade from the sun, shelter from the wind,
For the Compassionate One guides them,
takes them to the best springs.
I'll make all my mountains into roads,
turn them into a superhighway."

What a description of what we feel is going on here....Reconnecting. I pray that we are reconnecting the children with God. Each weekend, we put a story together from the Scriptures or other material focusing on His great love for them. Always a struggle with the language but I trust that some seeds are going out and landing in soil made ready. Putting the land in order is very prophetic. We've stopped the planting of the corn to give the land a rest. Pedro, our guardian planted about 4 acres with his usual amount of fertilizer and he yielded such a small amount of corn. I think the land is just flat our tired. We hope to compost and restore it. We have the word of the San Lucas Mission that they will help us to plant about 10,000 tree seedlings this coming rainy season beginning in May. Just this morning I walked only a portion of the property and tried to imagine what it might look like sometime in the future. Patience. We hope to plant some grass in order to have a play field for the kids. Just let them run in something other than dirt. As for the hungry and thirsty around us and having picnics and foodstands.....well we're opening up our home for our kids to come on Monday and Tuesdays for dinner and a shower and a clean bed in which to lay their heads. One of the children told me she sleeps on a carton and that her back hurts. The 'foodstand along all the roads' is actually quite amazing, in that we have been planning to open a little foodstand near the lookout point at the edge of our property. What we'll sell remains to be seen, but the ideas are building. This may be a future venture for the women who live here. It's not easy creating options for them. They may weave but hardly have an outlet for them as the place is saturated with textiles. We think that we may have a good location to have the women sell their foodstuffs since it is now unoccupied and there seems to be lots of traffic at times. We also have springs that are actually running off into the next property. We hope to capture that soon.
Most of all, I'm grateful that the Compassionate One is guiding us. How on earth could we make sense of all this without Him? My heart is that the children will know that we love and care for them. Their families will continue to be poor, continue to search for work that lifts them above the poverty level. We wish we could 'employ' them all, give to everyone who asks of us (and we hope to if it's in our power to do so....). But we take it one day at a time, one request at a time, one life at a time. And all the while, I find that the transformation that needs to take place is in me. But ofcourse, that's how it works.......