Wednesday, August 31, 2005

Katrina

My friends from Gulfport and New Orleans evacuated on Sunday and are fine – they don’t have any idea what the condition of their homes will be – but, they are doing well. They are worried about people that they know that chose to stay behind because communication is so bad that nobody knows much about the condition of the people that stayed back to “ride out the storm”. Personally, I can’t for the life of me figure out why anybody in their right mind was thinking when they decided to “ride out the storm”. All day Saturday and especially Sunday the forecasters were telling people that Katrina was going to be as bad as a storm could be – and on Sunday we all woke up to hear that she was a CATEGORY 5!... and that she was on her way to a direct hit on New Orleans and Mississippi.
About 70 or 75% of the people in the path of the pending disaster listened and left. That meant that there were still 25 or 30% of the people that heard the same warning and for one reason or another ignored the warnings and decided to stay behind. I do not understand what they could have been thinking….
To me this is just like hearing the warnings of Jesus and choosing instead to ignore them – pretending that they really don’t mean anything – that “since I can’t see the storm, it must not be there” – or, just hoping that ignoring the truth, it will just go away.
Katrina was like Jesus in another way too. Just like Jesus, nobody made the people that chose to ignore the warnings leave. Jesus said that following him was The Way and that we must follow him by our own choice. There isn’t one example where Jesus forced anybody into salvation…… I guess that you can’t force somebody to save themselves from a storm that they don’t want to be saved from.
As for me and my house, we will follow the Lord!

Tuesday, August 23, 2005

God's Amazing Plans

A few months ago I was standing in the middle of piece of property in a place called Santa Ana – a village that is about 15 miles from the airport in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. I was with friends and we all had the same question – What would God have us do with this land? At the time the land was for sale and the non profit group that I work with was looking for property to build a training center for the Mi Esperanza ministry. Doubt’s were there – where would we ever come up with $47,000?.... is there really a commitment?.... what if this isn’t God’s plan?...is the land too far from Tegucigalpa?...
We prayed for God to show us His will. Right in the middle of the land we prayed and almost immediately God started sending us his answers.
Within 36 hours, we were certain that the clear answers were right in front of us –
Almost ½ of the money for the land became available, funding for a clinic was found and the house that was on the property would make a perfect clinic, money for a planned new church building was already in place and the land was a perfect location, Jen Wright sent an email that said that she believed that God had called her to move to Honduras to take care of kids and the land is a perfect place for a children’s home, on and on, god provided answers for our prayers and we clearly saw that it was part of God’s plan for our ministry to buy this property.
I am amazed at how things have developed since April. The property is 100% paid for and it has been transformed from a sleepy piece of land into a place of action. The original house is almost ready to be opened into a clinic, there are now homes for 20 families, the church building is complete and people are worshiping there every Sunday and that building will soon be an integral part of the Santa Ana community, the ground is being prepared for construction of the children’s home and we will be there on December 10th for the opening celebration. The crazy thing is, we started looking at the land for a Mi Esperanza training center and have since seen that we’ll need more room to make that happen. It now looks like we will be attempting to buy another piece land – maybe the one directly across the road from the original property – for the training center. We plan to have a ground breaking for the center on the 10th of December – as part of the celebration of the opening of Casa de Esperanza – the children’s home.
I have fallen in love with the work of getting Casa de Esperanza off the ground. The two women that are leaving for this work on October 25th have become my family and I love them dearly. Jen & Karen clearly heard the words of Jesus - “Follow Me”, and they have chosen to do just that. They are two of my hero’s.
There is so much happening and so many good things ahead – I can’t wait to see what our amazing God has planned for the next few months!

Wednesday, August 17, 2005

Zoom.....

New job!
Planning a move!
Teaching a couple of classes!
Family!
TORCH!
Casa de Esperanza!
IRC Director Stuff!
ZOOM........Life is full and busy. I am amazed at how much stuff can pile on and how fast it can happen. The only word that I can think of to describe all that is happening is ....ZOOM.....
I like having a lot on the plate but, I am constantly reminded of the fact that once the plate is full, you can't add anything new without knocking something else off..... and usually when you knock something off of a plate, it lands somewhere that you didn't expect and it's messy!
I'm pretty convinced that Satan likes everybody to stay really busy and with full plates - that is because we (I) tend to over-fill my plate with things that seem to be really important and end up knocking things off of my plate that are truly important..... like a quiet time to study and to be alone with my God.
Jesus was so consistant in his example of this - he was always breaking away from the disciples to be alone with the Father. I am convinced that he gave these examples so that we would see the importance of time alone with the Father.
Nothing - even of full plate of distractions should come between the Father & me......

Monday, August 08, 2005

Two Weeks / Too Fast

I am back from Honduras and the time there was better than ever. I still can't believe that we pulled off a team of more than 175 and were able to keep everyone busy for the whole two weeks. It was literally amazing and fun from early morning to bedtime.
one of the most fun times of the day was standing in front of the 5 buses every morning and telling them to "start their engines" ..... had to be better than telling the drivers at Indy to do the same.
There are more stories and amazing things than I could possibly share in the short space of this blog but, if interested, you should read the trip reports at mstorch.blogspot.com
As I stated in my last post, I have changed jobs and the best way to contact me is at my personal email address marclt2003@yahoo.com
I'll be keeping the same cell number for a few weeks and will let anyone that emails me know the new number whenever I get it.
marc