Time And Place

My plans for this summer, like many of yours, are extremely unsure at the moment. Every day during this Coronavirus quarantine, there is news about progress being made against the pandemic and much of it seems contradictory. Schools in Texas have now closed their doors for the 2019-2020 year. It's hit me that I may never see some of my students again. Our administration has done a marvelous job of keeping all the moving parts together and even as long as I've taught, I have no clue what most of them are. Someone has to make tough decisions. I'm glad it's not me.

Since July of 1998, my summers have centered around mission trips. The last nine have been to Can Tho, Vietnam and the two before that were in China. With one trip to Haiti thrown into the mix, my out of the US experiences were shaped in Honduras. Eleven trips to the Central American country (it would have been twelve if not for the government overthrow days before our 2009 trip) opened my eyes to the poverty and despair which is the norm in much of  the world. The first five years of my trips were spent in Tegucigalpa, the capital city, before our group reorganized and began working in Choluteca, a city in southern Honduras close to both Nicaragua and El Salvador. During the Tegucigalpa years, our group, called TORCH, stayed at the Baxter Institute, a marvelous school which trains men and women to spread the Gospel in Central America. We would have breakfast and supper at Baxter while eating lunches in the surrounding villages where we were working with local churches. Late in the afternoons, we'd arrive back at Baxter in a state that  combined exhilaration with opportunities to serve mixed with despair absorbed  from the poverty we witnessed. Often, we were filthy from physical labor and badly in need of showering, sometimes complicated by water restrictions due to drought conditions. Our evenings were always highlighted with my favorite part of the day, our devotionals down in a storage room under the Baxter cafeteria. Those memories of sharing the day with believers profoundly changed my life.

I mentioned above that we  ate dinner back at Baxter after returning from the challenges of the day. But sometimes, Steve and Chad, our group leaders those years, would take us to a chicken place in downtown Tegucigalpa called Campero as pictured above. It was a chain chicken restaurant and the kids in our group loved it. In fact, they would often, as I recall, beg Steve and Chad to take us there for supper and teenagers can be persuasive, especially when they have worked hard and made you proud. Truthfully, I loved the Campero excursions myself. I don't recall that the food was out of the ordinary but it was the atmosphere of sharing a meal with people I had come to love. Part of the enjoyment was the transportation- we only traveled on old US school buses that served as our Gospel chariots during our time in Honduras. We would sing and laugh and carry on both coming and going. Man does not live on bread alone as Jesus famously quoted to Satan and as believers, we eagerly anticipated  feasting on chicken with each other in close quarters far from home. I miss those days. 

Do you know what's funny? Campero, which had its start in Guatemala,  has expanded into the US and has five locations in Houston. In fact, one of them is a thirty second walk outside my apartment gate which is only a 90 second walk from my apartment entrance! It was built about a year ago and does a very healthy amount of business. Guess how many times I've darkened its door? The answer is none with no plans to make it one or more. I'm sure the food is good and the service is, too, but....... it just doesn't matter anymore. There was a time and place when it did. Things that are important now didn't matter in the past and vice versa. Do you remember in 2 Samuel 23 when David longed for a drink from the well in his hometown Bethlehem and his men during  battle risked their lives to get it? I bet he had passed that well thousands of times as a kid without a second glance. Since I can't go to the gym now due to the pandemic, I walk 15,000 steps a day with a good number of those strides coming in the neighborhood. That means I walk past Campero on a daily basis. Invariably, my mind returns but there's an element missing. Their names were Trina and  Tricia and Shelly and Kathryn and Amy and Lisa and Ben and Rachel and Preston and Thom and Scott and Toney and Greg and Gerardo and............  A place without the people who make it memorable is just walls and a roof. It's the same with school campuses and church buildings. You simply can't replace flesh and blood. We are the memories of each other. God made us in His image and He gave us the ability to  love, to remember, and to be nostalgic. And this afternoon, I thank God  that He did.

Applicable quote of the day:
No memory is ever alone; it's at the end of a trail of memories, a dozen trails that each have their own associations.
Louis L'Amour

God bless,
Steve
Luke 18:1
E-mail me at shawley@westburychristian.org