When God Smiles

Honduras. Day 3.

(This is a later-than-the-date re-cap, because the Internet has been down at the house and I’m having to do all my posts at once).

Me and Kale worked at the Women’s Center today in Oriente. I’ll tell you more about that project on Day 4.

Today I really tried to bust it and work as hard as I could. And that meant mixing a whole lot of “Honduran style” concrete, which was TOUGH work. But the work isn’t what I want to talk about today.

I want to talk about recess.

Me and Kale were piling sand in buckets and taking them to the second story of the women’s center when we heard a bell sound and saw a bunch of little boys and girls run out from the school house next to the church building. We stopped working for a moment, and leaned on our shovels to just watch them. They ran around in circles, chasing each other and playing tag. There was not a single one of them that didn’t have a smile on their face. In the midst of the poverty of the second poorest country in the world, these kids still found reason to smile in the simple pleasures of a game of tag at recess. They forgot about the facts that their roofs leak, their food is non-existent, their dads are abusive; for this short period of time, between the tolls of two bells, these kids smiled.

I just looked at Kale and said, “They’re so happy. And they’re so innocent.” He said, “I know. When I see them, all I see is: pure.”

And I think that, today, I got a better glimpse of what Jesus meant when He asked us to become like little children. Through the purity that we gain through His blood, and that we strive to maintain by living in the Holy Spirit, there are recesses in our lives when we can have reason to smile. There are recesses when we enjoy the beauty of God’s creation and we smile. There are recesses when we stay up all night talking with someone we care about about things that we care about and we smile. There are recesses when we give of ourselves and it makes someone else smile, and we smile. In the midst of the sin of the world, God provides the peace of recesses. God provides the child-like joy of smiles.

And I think that that makes Him smile too.