Colombia Mission Trip 1-2013 Day 3
Again today, Tuesday January 22, 2013, God blessed us with a wonderful day. We spent the day with Maranatha International Foundation. They have a very interesting ministry. They focus on three different projects. The first is a Habitat for Humanity type ministry where they build houses for the poor in Bogota. Their goal is to build 100 houses. The second project is evangelistic events where they bring in evangelistic speakers like Nick Viujicic and hold giant evangelistic meetings. They have had approximately 95,000 conversions recorded in the last 6 years. The third project is Hogar De Paz (Home of Peace) where they take in children from the street each day and feed them, educate them, and win them to Christ and disciple them. This is the project that we came to see today. We were immediately impressed with the appearance and spirit of the place when we walked in. It really is a home of peace.
We had breakfast with them and then we spent the morning learning all about their foundation and about the children they serve. It was very refreshing to see a ministry serving vulnerable children whose main focus is the gospel and discipleship. They do many of the same social programs to help the children as others but their main focus is the heart because they know that true transformation of a child’s life is a supernatural happening brought about by the Holy Spirit. And all of the other needs in their life are secondary to breaking the cycle of sin, hopelessness, and abuse prevalent in their families because the life that Jesus gives is absent.
In the afternoon the children arrived and we played at the park for awhile and then came in to play board games and puzzles. It was so much fun playing with these sweet and happy children who once were withdrawn and angry and had witnessed horrible atrocities on the street and in war but now through the work of Hogar De Paz and the glorious gospel they are new little people. I had the most fun playing a memory game with a bunch of kids where we had these giant cards with pictures of all different faces of dinosaurs on them. We had the whole table covered in these cards face up and then we would give each child two seconds to look at the cards and then we turned them all over and they had to guess from memory where the duplicate cards were located. I was stunned at how smart these little 5 and 6 year olds were as they would just walk up and pick out the pair over and over again. It was so wild because they would scream and dance and jump around when they got it right. It was too cute.
An hour before it was time to go we gathered up for devotion. Some of the parents of the children who are now working during the day while the children are at school and then Hogar De Paz began to drift in while we were singing worship songs and then the children sang several songs and then it was time for the devotion. Each of the team members got up and gave their testimony and it was amazing how some of the team members childhood testimonies resembled what these children have seen and how good it was for them to hear the difference that Christ has made in each of our lives. David Attaway gave the entire gospel message from Romans and all of those parents were sitting there listening intently.
God is doing a great work through Maranatha and we were very blessed to spend the day with them. God has given us a very blessed, calm, and intimate trip and we are grateful and blessed. One of the team members this morning, Jay from Chicago, said that he originally was supposed to go on a mission trip to Nicaragua but it didn’t work out and so he sort of felt at the time like he was settling for the Colombia trip but WOW has God blown his mind and he knows that this is where he was supposed to be. Praise God. Thank you for your prayers.
Matt Bullen