Time Is Flying

I can't believe that in exactly one month I will be leaving Honduras!  Time has definitely flown by, and I don't know how I will ever leave.  I have met so many beautiful people.
Like Dania:

Dania is sixteen and lives with Leslie and her family.  She goes to school in the morning, works in the afternoon with the other students, and then goes home and helps take care of the kids at night.  I have never heard one complaint from her, and it is so heart-warming to see the love and affection she has for the children; they are closer than family.

And Leslie and Osman:

Leslie and Osman both work at the school, in very stressful jobs.  But you can tell they love every minute of it, and they put their hearts and souls into this ministry and into the students at El Sembrador.  Leslie makes it a point to chat with all the students as she walks by them and learn all their names, which is no easy task.  Osman will come home exhausted after a long day of work and then go right back out to play soccer with some of the boys.  They are truly amazing servants of God.

But the kid who stole my heart today was Samir:

I wish I had a better picture of him, but this is the only one I had.  This is on his profile on the El Sembrador website.  Every student who is in need of a sponsor to pay for school has a picture and a little paragraph about them.  All of the kids are asked what they would like to do in the future.  Most kids say typical things like "I want to be a pilot," or "I'm going to be an architect."  This was Samir's answer: "In the future I would like to buy my mom a piece of land and build a house for her."  Of all the things he could be dreaming for himself, the first thing he wants to do is provide for his mother.  I pray that his dream will become a reality.

I have been learning a lot about prayer during my time here.  One of the big lessons I learned today was a reminder of how much God cares about everything in our lives, no matter how big or small.  This morning Leslie and I prayed for all the sponsors of the students here.  Later this afternoon the family visiting here signed the papers to sponsor two children to go to school (one of them, praise God, is Samir).  And then after work we were taking a walk by the river and Leslie's son Osman lost one of his shoes in the water and the current swept it away.  He was crying because it was his only pair of flip-flops, so I said a quick prayer that we would find it.  Not two minutes later I spotted the shoe floating right past me, and we were able to rescue it from going downstream.  It blows my mind that the God of this universe, the one who created the world and sent His only Son to die for us, would care so deeply for a lost flip-flop.  But He does.  What a beautiful God we serve!