As I write I am sitting in a cement block house near the top
of a mountain that has no name an hour outside of a city which I cannot spell,
much less say right. I am in
Honduras.
Kate sits behind me on the bed James and I are borrowing for
another three weeks or so. She
sits and merrily sews fuzzy white yarn with a very blunt needle into plastic
canvas. She is creating a little
box with a grinning bunny face upon it.
I have never seen her happier, this creative child of mine. Nothing brings her greater joy than
making things. Her name, Katherine
Joy, means “Pure Joy” and nothing makes her heart sing more than crafting
something beautiful out of things others might consider trash. Her “Collection of Collections”
underneath her bed testifies to this gift of hers, making something out of what
others quickly dismiss as nothing, nothing of any real value. A box of used batteries, a box of
colorful lids of markers long dried out and thrown away, a box of various
glittery things found on the floors of mall playplaces and left over from
birthday parties, and many other things waiting for the right moment of
inspiration. This little girl
teaches me of our Father, hers and mine, who never wastes anything, and sees
value in the things everyone else considers leftovers, trash, or
worthless. In the hands of a
Creator, there is nothing worthless.
Everything, even things we label as terrible, painful, a mistake or a
waste can come alive to whisper His redemption, sing His majesty, and testify to
His unfathomable creativity and ability to make beauty from ashes.
This I know from my life. I have experienced hurt, rejection, pain, fear, loss and
sorrow so deep I felt if I even began to cry, I would never stop. How it is that my God has taken the
mess and of it made majesty? He is
so amazing, my fingers could never type words eloquent enough to even begin to
capture it. I thank Him for the
creative process He is working in me, in James and my marriage, in our family
of five, in our journey Home.
After all, every morning we are given the gift of waking up is one day further in our journey to Home. I
want to travel well. And take as
many sojourners with me as Papa allows.
Every day we live, we are one day closer to Home.
Speaking of journeys, you may wonder how it is we came to
Honduras for nearly a month of our summer. Mostly for my own clarification and processing, I will write
it out here.
James and I met at Ouachita Baptist University in
Arkadelphia, Arkansas. (Oh yeah, we're going way back...) We fell in
love and a great many other things happened soon after that, including but not
limited to a plane crash, a two-month hospitalization resulting from a
life-altering injury, a six-month engagement and resulting marriage, and a
courtroom battle fought against a major airline. And that was the first 18 months of our journey
together. (Please imagine me
throwing back my head and laughing loudly, not out of the bitter cynicism that
once infected my soul, but out of crazy joy from all that God has delivered us
through and from.)
During our first days of falling in love, the Spring of
1999, we often went for long, lazy walks in the sultry Arkansas spring
evenings. Even now, over 13 years
later, the scent of honeysuckle wafting on waves of humid evening air makes my
heart go pitter-patter. I am right
back there, strolling lazily along, hand in hand with this tall, dark Asian
fellow that just months before was nothing but an awkward missionary kid that I
always mistook as a foreign exchange student who spoke English really well. But I digress.
I am not sure how it happened the first time, but it became
a pretty common event for us to end up on a professor and his wife’s porch not
far from campus, confiscating their porch swing for the evening. If we were really fortunate, they might
come out and visit with us. Bryan
and Leigh Anne were actually not much older than we, maybe five years, but they
had recently returned to Ouachita after his graduating law school. He was legal counsel for the University
and taught an occasional class, one of which James had been in the semester
before. She worked in the
Admissions office. As I mentioned,
very shortly after, just around four months after James and I started our
journey of falling in love, I was in a major airline disaster traveling with a
choir from Ouachita.
I had to stay home in Oklahoma the following fall. During this time, James and I wrote
letters, occasionally called, and emailed back and forth. Oh, that was a miserable and lonely
time that seemed to stretch on forever.
We got engaged that Christmas (1999) and I returned to campus, and began
to plan a wedding. When the
weather warmed up, James and I found ourselves again on Bryan and Leigh Anne’s
porch. It was only one year later,
yet we had traveled thousands of very difficult emotional miles, and were still
struggling in countless ways. Our
time on their porch and later in their young-marrieds fellowship class at Park
Hill Church was life-giving in so many ways. I so needed to feel normal when everything in our lives was
spinning madly out of control.
They let me be me, the me they had known before and didn’t openly pity
me like I felt from so many. I was
such a hot mess. I chuckle to
think what mess I brought to their peaceful porch all those evenings. Regardless, they were a haven indeed
and we watched them closely, both their personal walks with Christ and the way
they tended their marriage. Bryan
gave James and I wise and biblical counsel regarding our decision to sue the
airline. There were so many
screaming voices in our heads and pressure from all manner of outside sources
about what to do, his steady voice speaking truth and grace and wisdom was like
cool water in a scorching desert.
God used them, their personal lives, and the peace of their porch to minister
to us in a very chaotic time in our lives.
Our friendship has continued. We actually have children around the same ages, and secretly
have plans to do some very stealth and skillful smooshing together of them to
see if anything sticks relationally in the years to come. I admire deeply their purposeful
parenting, the order and intentionality of the way Leigh Anne runs her home,
and Bryan’s self-effacing humor.
In the twelve years since we have left Arkadelphia, Bryan has become
Dean of the School of Business and God has grown in he and James a common
passion: the ministry of business as missions.
Over the past few years they have read the same books and
entered into email conversations with a few other like-minded (read: brilliant,
God-loving, passionate for the spread of the Gospel) guys who desire to hash
out hard questions like how best to help the poor without creating a cycle of
dependence? They like to kick
around abstract economic theories and then ask the hard questions of how does
this apply to us personally and to God’s people, the church? How can we effectively do what he has
called us to do – take care of the poor, the widows, the orphans? This kind of think tank stuff makes my
head spin and I thank God for giving James Bryan and a handful of other really
clever guy friends to wrestle over these things with.
So around October of last year, Bryan called James with an
offer. A ‘friend of a friend’ kind
of opportunity. An “Hey, I got a
guy” kind of connection. So, it
turns out that Bryan had a connection with a family serving as house parents in
a children’s residency program outside of Tegucigalpa, Honduras. The program is sort of a mountain farm
that grows amazingly delicious coffee and blackberries out of which they make
jam and different teas. The idea
was to travel to Honduras with Bryan and a small team of business students from
Ouachita to Rancho Ebenezer in order to see the operation and get to know the
business side of it in order to try and find a market niche for their products
so they can become more sustainable.
Please imagine the excited gleam in my husband’s chocolate brown eyes,
because for a business-as-missions kind of guy, this opportunity was hitting
the jackpot. The small team left
in January for a whirlwind tour of the facilities, the Ranch and the ministry.
Upon his return, James found it difficult to describe what
he had experienced. The
opportunity for growth, the beauty of the ministry, the structure of the homes,
and the delightful children stole his heart. There are around two dozen of them, ranging in ages from 3
to 17, plucked from the streets and removed from homes in the inner city in
which their parents were unable to care for them. On the ranch, they are growing up in homes with house
parents who love the Lord, and are protected, cared for, taught well and
growing into God-fearing, Christ-loving, gospel-spreading Hondurans. It was just the kind of thing James and
I had originally been passionate about in our early years of marriage as we
hashed out what our calling might be as a couple and now as a family. We are
hungry to find programs that support Christian ethnic people in their own
countries to take in orphaned or abandoned children who desire to raise deeply
passionate Christian young people who can shake up their own country for
Jesus. I am a huge supporter of
adoption both domestic and international, but I can’t help but ask the
question, “how can a nation rise up into healing if we deplete it of its most
precious natural resource, its children”?
We have long desired to support this very kind of ministry, one that is
empowering local people to care for their own, in their own language and
culture to, by God’s grace, raise up a generation of world changers launched
into their native culture and context.
James came home excited for me to see it for myself, this
coffee-roasting, blackberry-growing, Honduran kid-rearing ranch high on a
mountain somewhere in central America.
So, we decided to visit as a family this summer. Bryan and Leigh Anne also planned to
come with us (perhaps the initial stage of our stealth plan to smoosh our
children together, yes I know they are all 10 and under, but the pictures might
come in handy at the rehearsal dinner…).
We threw some dates back and forth and entered into conversations with
the staff of World Gospel Outreach about a short trip to have the Rancho
Ebenezer experience.
About mid-March we received an email simply asking, “Instead
of a four-day trip, would you consider something more along of the lines of a
six-week visit? We are in need of
some substitute house parents when a missionary couple goes on furlough for the
summer…”
Whoa.
Last fall I devoured an autobiography of a young
20-something named Katie whom God has used to launch a ministry in Uganda. It is called “Kisses From Katie” and
she details the radical, amazing journey the Lord has led her on over the past
four or so years, so amazing that she has written this autobiography as a
20-something and I cannot wait to watch the rest of her story unfold, for there
are many chapters left to be lived.
In one of the chapters she simply states (I do not have my copy with me
here – so I am loosely quoting from memory and will fix it later) “People say I
must be ‘special’, that God has ‘special’ plans for my life. All I do is simply wake up and say
“yes!” to whatever it is God has for me that day. All I do is what He gives me for that day.” And there she is, a single white
20-some year old female, now an adoptive mother to around a dozen Ugandan girls
and operating a ministry that feeds and provides school fees and uniforms for
hundreds of Ugandan children. I
suppose instead of saying “Yes to the Dress”, she has trained herself to say
“Yes to the Mess”, and trusts God to see it through, after all, it was His idea
in the first place.
Well, James and I have often been overwhelmed with the needs
of this world, the reality of the suffering and hurt and loss and depravity and
exploitation of innocence. Where
do we even begin to help the hurting, to find ways to reach out to those who do
the hurting? Where do we even
begin to meet the staggering practical needs all around this world, always with
the goal of feeding the greater hunger of spiritual starvation with the Bread
of the Life, Jesus Christ? Well,
we are learning to simply wake up and say yes. We can only be obedient with the opportunities we are
offered. We are only asked to do
what is placed before us.
So, when the question was asked “how about six weeks instead
of four days?” the answer was simple.
What can we do with this opportunity given? We consulted our calendars and said yes to the dates we felt
our family could offer.
And here we are on a mountain, in a cement block house,
somewhere in central America. I am
still not totally sure I can find Honduras on a map, but I tackled the grocery
store yesterday afternoon with the 17-year old Fany as my right-hand gal (Who
am I kidding? She was really in
charge of me, poor thing.) And
today we Chengs begin week 2 of cooking and caring for, playing and laughing
with three of those little people James and I decided long ago we wanted to be
passionate about. A precious
national and spiritual resource, redeemed from the streets and the hands of
broken parents with broken hearts who were for countless reasons unable to care
and provide for them, taken up on a mountain farm and tenderly grown into
something beautiful by the grace of our Lord.
I love our Creator.
He indeed makes all things new.
Especially me.
