Christ Transforms Lives

Honduras. Day 4.

I stared Death in the face today.

Okay, so that’s a little over dramatic. But I did at least stare “Montezuma’s Revenge” in the face today (for those of you that don’t know what that is, it’s basically a bad stomach bug; for those of you that do know what that is, you know it is so much more than that). This little boy came around selling tamales, and Ricardo bought one for me and told me to try it. “It’s very good,” he said. So there I was, my friend Ricardo paying for me, a cute little tamale boy offering one to me, and I stood there, knowing that if I eat this stuff, it is going to be BAD. But being the idiot that I am, I took a couple of bites, smiled real big and said, “It’s good, thank you,” and then walked away. Milton stopped me and just laughed. He said, “Man, you can’t eat that!” So once out of sight, I threw the tamale away and hoped that I would make it. Thankfully, a couple of bites didn’t do the trick, and I got through the day without doing the “Dance of the Shoo-Shoo.”

Other than that, it was a pretty great day. I definitely realized today that, coming to Honduras, I have expanded my family greatly. Having friends is great, but having family is even better. And I have found family in the AIM workers. Kale, Felicia, Andrea, Rainer, Keith, and Steven. They are awesome, and they are inspirations. I’m constantly having conversations with them about what it means to really love people, serve people, be a Christian, get through this life and get into the next. They are open-minded, they are non-traditional, they are all about spirituality and not about fake religion, and every time I’m around them their genuine examples magnify Christ’s name in my life.

I have found family in Marc and Terri. I have found family in Nicole and Matt. I know I won’t get to live with them for too much longer because we will be moving to the city soon (Marc found a couple of really nice apartments, safe ones, that have good showers and Internet and all that, and we’ll move there next week), but I really enjoy being around them. They’re great encouragements, and I can always look to them as examples of sacrifice and commitment.

I have found family in Milton and Louis, Timoteo’s sons, who Marc employs to work alongside TORCH teams. I have worked really close with them this past week, and when we were slacking off we were always laughing it up. They’re good guys. They’ve already taught me a ton of Spanish, and they always provide a good laugh.

But I say all that to talk about what happened today that really affected me. Today I realized so much about what it means to be in the family of Christ.

I have been working in a village outside of Tegucigalpa for the past three days called Oriente (it’s a lower division of Nuevo Oriental, for anyone that worked there in 2005). I’ve been the only TORCH intern here so far (Nolan and Karis just got here today), and some of the AIMers have worked with me, but most of the time it’s just been me in Oriente. Anyways, me and Milton and Louis go to Oriente and we’ve been building a women’s center near the church in the village. It’s a two-story cement block building, and it’s been a challenge. I have had to learn to mix concrete “Honduran style,” which basically means building a volcano out of a ton of heavy sand and concrete and then pouring water in it and shoveling it around until it turns into concrete. Not easy, to say the least. Once it’s finished, all of the women in the village will have toilets and showers for use, as well as “pillas,” which are “manual” washing machines, and an upstairs for ladies Bible classes and sewing classes. It’s a cool project, and I’ve enjoyed helping with it. But it’s not the project that’s been so cool.

Marc has employed several other men in the community to work with us on the project. And some of them have shown me so much about being brothers in Christ. Something you should know is that a lot of men in the Honduran community are pretty pathetic, to say the least. They mistreat women, get drunk all the time, and talk pretty terrible. But the guys that I have been working with on the women’s center have been great men. I got to be really good friends with three of them in particular: Ricardo, Alex, and Erixon. Ricardo is an older gentleman who lives at the pulperia across the street and would often make coffee and cookies for me, as well as just give me Zambos chips and Cokes. He dances while he works, laughs a lot, enjoys teaching me Spanish, and always has a happy spirit about him. Alex, who all of the Hondurans call “Chile,” which is the equivalent of them calling him, “Whitee,” because he is light skinned and has green eyes, has been a good friend too. He’s been the one that I’ve mixed concrete with the most. He has taught me some Spanish, and he’s been asking me to teach him a lot English. Erixon has been just as great a friend, and I’ll talk more about him in a second. I wondered, what is it about these three guys that makes them so happy, so nice, so kind, in a society where that’s abnormal?

Ricardo answered that for me.

At the end of the day today, I was drinking coffee with Milton and Ricardo, and Ricardo started telling me about the church there. He said that he really enjoys going. I told him that I’m glad he’s going to church there, and then I asked who else went with him. His answer? Alex and Erixon. The three guys that had become my best friends over the past few days and had been so nice to me even when no one else would have been were Christians.

What a coincidence.

Now, let me tell you about my conversation with Erixon today. We were filling in a hole out behind the building, and we were making our best attempts at having a conversation through our language barrier. I can get along okay in Spanish, and he was learning bits of English, so we eventually got to talking about a lot of different stuff. At one point, he asked me if I had any family here. I told him that I didn’t have any here in Honduras, but I had family back in the States. Then I smiled and told him that I did have family in Christ here in Honduras.

Erixon stopped shoveling.

“You are a Christian?” he asked. I told him yes, and he got really excited. He told me that he was too. And then I shook his hand and told him that that means we are brothers. Then he said, in broken English, “You are my good friend, and my brother.” I smiled, and started to shovel again. But he wasn’t finished yet. He wanted to tell me about what it meant for him to be a Christian. He told me about how beautiful Christ was to him, about how great he was, and then he said in Spanish (and I’ll translate), “He has transformed my life.”

In a country where kind, friendly men are hard to come by, and here I was and I had found three amazing new friends, I didn’t have to wonder what it was about them that made us fast friends any more. It was Christ. Christ transformed their lives. And even though I didn’t know it at the time, it was so easy to become friends with them because I was already brothers with them. And brothers in Christ are transformed men.

Because Christ transforms lives.