Back Home Again

It was an adventure but I'm back in Houston! I was supposed to sleep in my own bed last night but instead, I lay my head on a very soft pillow in the Crown Plaza Hotel next to the Miami Airport. Our flight out of Honduras was delayed by ninety minutes, we sat on the runway in Miami for forty more, then stood in line more than two hours to pass through Customs, resulting in my 9:05 PM flight to take off without me. As always, the Lord handled the situation much better than I could have imagined. I did manage to have my two suitcases disappear yesterday somewhere between the hotel and the airport in San Pedro Sula, never to be seen again. I will be shoes/belt/shorts/underwear shopping in the next several days....and I probably need to pick up some luggage while I'm at it. (In a potentially serious blow to my finding my true love in China next week, my Lucky You Cologne was a casualty in the suitcase heist!)

As my other missions to Honduras have been, this was a terrific trip. Both the kids and adults in our group worked hard to serve the Lord by ministering to our fellow man. We are very blessed here in the States. While we complain about the cost of gas, consider what the fuel increases have done to the main staples in the diet of the poor in Honduras. In the past year, the costs of beans and corn have doubled while the price of rice has tripled. To make matters worse, fertilizer, which is petroleum based, has become prohibitively expensive, making farming more difficult and less productive. In the US, we spend a small percentage of our income on food. In poorer nations, the percentage is much, much higher. In spite of the hardships they face, we found the brothers and sisters we worked with to be joyful and perhaps more spiritually focused than their North American counterparts. Jesus said the poor would always be with us. Fortunately, physical poverty does not insure spiritual poverty. Unfortunately, neither does material wealth insure righteousness. If it did, we would be turning the world upside down.
Applicable quote of the day:
"Anyone who has struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor."
-- James Baldwin

God bless,
Steve
Luke 18:1
E-mail me at steve@hawleybooks.com