You can see a lot in someone’s eyes.  Joy, fear, peace, happiness, hunger, pain.  Even after six weeks, I’m still processing my experiences from La Ceiba, Honduras…mostly when I look into the eyes of my own children.

The eyes on the left belong to my 7 year old daughter Anna.  I’ve met very few girls as care free and in love with life as this little one.  She spends her summer days playing with dolls, dressing up like a princess, riding her new purple bike, and playing with her friends.  She’s getting a passion for fashion, so it’s not out of the ordinary to see her in five different outfits on any given day.  And in the midst of all her carefree summer daydreaming, when Anna looks into the future the possibilities are endless.  Actually, it’s involuntary.  She doesn’t even question it, because she innately knows her future is full of limitless potential if she’s willing to pursue it.  She has the creativity, the relationships, and the culture around her to make it happen.  You can see it in her eyes.

The eyes on the right belong to Lourdess, a 7 year old girl we met in La Ceiba.  She lives in a square, wooden-box of a house with cardboard for “drywall,” about the size of our family room, with her mom and dad (a rare blessing in this community) and a plethora of brothers and sisters.  Dad is constantly struggling to find work in this depressed economy, but unlike so many other fathers from the neighborhood, has chosen (at least for now) not to leave his family for work in the USA.  Lourdess loves to play, too.  She had a doll, some crayons (she even gave us a picture she had drawn), and an old worn-out Disney princess dress.  The same dress hangs in my Anna’s closet here in Indy.

But as I wrote from Honduras, the greatest struggle for me is not the lack of money or even the awful living conditions.  It was in the eyes.  The hope, the encouragement, the possibilities that impulsively fill the gaze of my little Anna aren’t even in the lexicon for Lourdess.  In fact, when we asked many of these young children about their “sueños” (or dreams of the future), they required further explanation.  Not only did they have no vision for the future, they had no context in which to even understand the question.

Honestly, I don’t know what to do with all this.  Guilt is not a valid motivator, and God doesn’t use condemnation to push us in His direction.  But I do know we all need to embrace the journey, to ask God what He wants from us.  He never holds us accountable for what we don’t have, but He has high expectations for us to properly use what we do. That’s why we’re partnering with organizations like Mission of Mercy to try and do what we can to make a dent into the hopelessness we encountered in Honduras.

How do we fill both sets of eyes with the same limitless hope?  Not hope for the American way of life which is found in a temporary, man-made culture; but the Hope of the Creator of life, the limitless God-possibilities woven into our very being and intended for eternity.  The truth is, you don’t have to go to Honduras to find the injustice of hopelessness.  Just look into the eyes all around you.  Time for God’s people to right that wrong.

Poverty sucks.  It didn’t take me too long to determine that.  Bet you don’t disagree either, even if you’ve never touched it, tasted it, or smelled it for yourself.  As I walked the streets of Las Delicious, a small shanty-town community in La Ceiba, Honduras, the reality of what I knew existed was literally all around me.  It’s almost as if my brain instinctively compartmentalized, packaging up the things it could process and eliminating the pieces it didn’t know what to do with.  No one should live like this…dirt floors, cardboard box walls, scraping for food, families of six all sleeping in a room smaller than my master bedroom closet.  But it wasn’t the lack of money or resources that bothered me most.

Hope had left the building.  There was none.  Nowhere to be seen.  When these little kids…kids with names and faces and eyes I could stare deeply into…when they look into their future, they see nothing.  Nothing.  There is no vision of better circumstances, of greater opportunity.  There’s no encouragement to discover the fullness of the “Imago Deo,” or image of God that is imprinted into their very being.  Creativity is smothered by lack of vision, and the untapped creative potential in these little faces was the hardest thing for me to digest.  They live in the slums, they are the slums, and they will always be the slums.  That is a recipe for hopelessness.  And that, my friends, is the worst of injustices.

How do we make that right?  I guess that’s the million dollar question.  I think it starts somewhere inside of me, with the realization that I actually have something of value to offer.  Money?  Sure.  Resources are imperative to solving this crisis.  But perhaps the single greatest thing we can offer another human being is hope.  That obviously starts with Jesus Christ.  But encapsulated in that is an opportunity and responsibility for me to help someone else look into their future and see what God originally intended.  To pull back the weeds, clear a pathway, remove the rubble that keeps them from seeing God’s vision for their lives.  I can do that in Honduras.  And we will.  But I can also do that in the lives of those I encounter every single day.  Will we?

Hitting the sack here in Honduras after a long travel day.  Two short flights with one long layover.  For the record, if you have 5 hours to kill, I would strongly suggest you not do it in the San Pedro airport.

Tomorrow we head out early to help with a new Mission of Mercy mobile dental clinic.  In the afternoon we visit the first of three future sites for MoM childrens centers.  City Community Church is hoping to get in the mix literally from the ground up here in La Ceiba.  We’ll meet the local pastors, get a hands on view of the area, and spend time visiting the homes of the families and children that will be affected by the presence of this center.  It’s sure to be a wildly emotional day.

Please pray for us, that we see clearly what God is already doing here in La Ceiba and know what part we have to play in seeing it become reality.  More to come soon.

Packing up tonight for a short trip to La Ceiba, Honduras…only 2 full days with a travel day on each end.  Heading out with my wife Mandy and our co-pastors Nathan & Tricia LaGrange to connect with Jack Eans of Mission of Mercy.  We’ll be spending the rest of this week visiting Mercy Centers near La Ceiba, but more importantly traveling to communities that don’t have a center…yet.  That’s where we come in.

We’ll be spending a majority of our time in communities where centers are planned but not yet built, looking at future sites, talking to leaders, and even visiting families in their homes.  Our hope is that over the next few years, City Community Church can partner with MoM to literally transform the landscape of these communities.

Stay tuned for blogs, tweets, and maybe even a video post or two from Honduras.  And be thinking of ways you can potentially partner with us in bringing the reality of Jesus love to these beautiful people.