The Answer

Have you ever prayed for direction - asking God to help you with an answer when you already had in mind what His answer would be? ...only to have an obvious answer that was completely different than the one that you assumed. Well, it happens to me more often than I'd like to admit and it happened again just this past week.
On Friday I was travelling from Salt Lake City to St Louis via Chicago and as usual, turned my phone on as soon as the plane touched the ground in Chicago. There were a bunch of messages - nothing unusual except there were about 5 from my friend Tim and knowing that he was in Honduras, these were the first messages that I read. By the time that I finished the messages, I realized that there was an urgent situation with 5 little boys that needed a home and perhaps, Casa de Esperanza would be able to help. I called Tim and that led to calls to Jennifer - who is currently in Ohio for a mission conference - and Karen in Santa Ana. We all agreed that we would pray for God to guide our way and show us what he would have us do. We had just taken on 5 more kids about 10 days ago and the quick addition of 5 more would be unexpected to say the least. By the end of the weekend, I think that all of us had concluded that if these children needed a home, then we were the ones called to take care of them. Then on Monday morning and Karen was preparing to go into Tegucigalpa to meet the boys, she received a call from the lawyer that they had already been placed in another home. So, there ya' go! Here we all thought that God's answer was going to be that we were the ones to take care of these kids and - well, we were surprised with the direct answer that we received. Our God is good...all the time.
I am blessed to be associated with people like Karen & Jennifer that are so willing to listen to God's answer - even if it would mean that life would be turned upside down by following Him.
Can you imagine going from 5 kids in October to 15 two weekd later. All of them under 7 years old!
The answer is to trust God. It's that simple.
The answer in Honduras and so many other third world countries for the children is YOU & ME. If we know that there are children in need and we don't do anything about it, then we are showing the extent of our love or lack of it. There is a Proverb that says "If you hear the cries of the poor and do nothing, then one day you too will cry out and not be heard!"
Just because you can't actually hear the children crying themselves to sleep every night at Casitas Kennedy - they are and because we know that, we cannot ignore them. I can't.
Marc