Honduras, Here I Come!!

So in 24 hours I will be on an airplane headed to Tegcucigalpa, Honduras with a group from my church for an amazing week. I simply cannot wait. This will be my 3rd trip to Honduras with the church, and I must say, that this trip is addicting.

God has done a lot of amazing things on these trips to Honduras. The first year I went, He confirmed to me my call to missions, and out of that caused me to break up with the guy I was dating from Guatemala. It was my first missions experience apart from my parents, and it changed my life completely. He confirmed to me that He wanted nothing less than what my parents and grandparents had given Him, a live of utter obedience, and consequently ministry.

I skipped one year between the first time I went and the second time I went, and on the trip last year (my second trip) I made some precious friends. I had the opportunity to get close to a lady at my church who has been such an incredible blessing. My brother also went last year, and it was fun watching him in action in missions, to which he and his wife have also expressed a call.

This year will likely be my last trip to Honduras with First Baptist Irving for quite a while. My sweet roommate, Courtney is going for the first time, and I can't wait for her to reap the blessings that going on this trip will bring her.

I wold beg your prayers for all of us next week. Here are some specifics:

1. The community we will be serving is the location of a new church plant that has yet to be established. Pray that God would use our group of 36 crazy Americans to provide an open door to the gospel, particularly through ministry to children and women.
2. Pray for the hearts of the people we will come in contact with, that they would be attracted to the Gospel and receive it as we present it.
3. We will be doing some women's ministry, and the theme I have chosen for that is "The God Who Sees Me". I will be presenting the stories of Eve, Hagar, and The Samaritan Women. We will also be presenting the Gospel to these women on one of the days. Pray that they in their loneliness (many of their husbands are in the States or off with other women) would long to know the God who sees them, and that they would accept His gift of salvation.
4. Pray for safety as we travel, minister, and tour.
5. Pray that the motives of each and every person on the team would be pure and God honoring, not for ourselves.

Thank you so much for your prayers. I will be sure to post pictures when we return!

Mangos

Today, while sitting in class, a random, precious memory entered my mind. My World Lit 1 professor was talking about the Odyssey, and she said the word "ration." I'm not quite sure what the context was, but I do know that whenever I hear the word "ration" my mind automatically takes me back in time to when I was an 8-year old visiting my grandparents who were missionaries in Honduras at the time. This was the summer between my second and third grade, 1994.

Honduras was experiencing a terrible drought, so water and electricity were being rationed for several hours a day by the government. The power and water only came on for a few hours early early in the morning and in the evening, so we would have to fill buckets with water the night before if we wanted to bathe the next morning. I believe that this was also the summer when my brother and I developed our fascination with entertaining ourselves with candles every time we were around them. Picking the dripping wax off the sides of the candles, rolling it up in little balls of wax, and yes, we even added kool-aid powder to some wax to make it the color we wanted and to see if it would taste/smell like kool-aid candles. Duh.

Our parents had sent us to stay with our grandparents for three weeks that Summer. We went to mission meeting with them at a lake in Honduras, which had a Baptist camp grounds. The place was so humid and disgusting. The name of the camp was (and still is....) BAGOPE, and acronym in Spanish for "Bautistas Gozando y Pescando" (Baptists Enjoying and Fishing). Whatever...the missionaries joke that what BAGOPE is really an acronym for "bugs and gnats on people everwhere." Because if you've never been there, that is really what the whole experience of BAGOPE is. Because even though there are screens on all the windows and doors you have to have a mosquito net to sleep under. I went back there several times throughout Jr. high and High School, and I must say it is not one of my favorite places to visit.

That was one of the weirdest Summers of my life. It was the Summer that my parents moved us permanently to Xela, the city we had lived in half of the time when we weren't living in our village....and when my brother and I got back, we were all moved in to our house and out of the village house that we went to maybe once a month after that.

This was also the Summer when, I guess one night while I was sleeping, I got bit by some sort of "blister bug." I had a massive blister on the back of my leg for days, and it was painful. I had to take antibiotics or something to get rid of it. Weird...don't ever get bit by a blister bug.

Back to my point. One of the best memories I have of this Summer was in Honduras, at my grandparents' house. On those nights when the power was out, those hot, muggy afternoons in one of the warmest places in Central America, my grandmother would cut Mangos (just to clarify, "mango" is pronounced with a long a, as in ah...NOT with a short a as in a) that had to have been the size of a small watermelon. The things were massively huge, and the most delicious Mangos I have ever had in my life. Even to this day, I can't say that I've seen a Mango as big as the ones that my grandmother used to cut for us, nor have I tasted anything as delicious as those Mangos that were the highlight of possibly one of the strangest, most precious Summers of my life.