Why we're here

Well, I wish I was a little more regular at this. It’s hard to imagine being any more irregular but something always seems to come up and I run out of time. Not to mention that it’s a little more difficult to get online down here. Anyway, things have come a long way since I last made time to post. We now have an almost completed skate-park and a regular youth program taking place each Friday night where the kids are getting exposed to biblical truth and are having lots of fun at the same time. At the same time, the kid’s church is going well on Sunday mornings and the house churches (both an English and a Spanish speaking church) are beginning to grow.

Sometimes it is hard to believe that I actually have the opportunity to be a part of what God is doing down here. The more time I spend with the kids of Puerto Viejo, the more time I want to spend with them. They are an incredible group of kids that come from some pretty gnarly home situations. A couple of Friday nights ago, Louie (who heads up the youth program) asked the kids to write down some questions that they had about life, God, church, etc… on index cards that he handed out, so that we could answer the questions from a biblical perspective. I helped one kid write down his question on the card and almost started crying when I read what he wrote. He is only ten years old and he wrote, “Why is it that someone can hit you and God doesn’t come and help you?” That really hit me and gave me a better sense of what these kids deal with on a regular basis. Some of the other questions addressed the existence of God and other questions such as what happens to you if you commit suicide? I was blown away by the depth of the questions but at the same time am very excited about the possibility of answering the questions with the love of Jesus. It is such a privilege to have the opportunity to pour into the lives of these kids when they are at such transition points in their lives. Already, two of them are coming to our house church and a third expressed interest in coming tomorrow. I pray that God speaks to them and works in their lives so that one day soon, they are the ones taking the good news of Jesus to the people of this community.