BRING ME HOPE RETREAT 2010
DOOR OF FAITH ORPHANAGE
THE DUMP
The Sunday after Christmas I went to Door of Faith Orphanage with all my Bring Me Hope friends for the retreat. What an awesome way to spend a retreat- others focused! We got to put on a camp (memories of China flooded back!) for about twenty of the one hundred kids that live there. DJ and Lynette, the on-sight administrators of the orphanage, are so wise and have created a Christ-centered refuge for the children there. DOFO has three main priorities that make it different from most orphanages in Mexico. I copied and pasted them from the website (dofo.org) because they are so good! They are:
Family: To provide family atmosphere for the children. They see the traditional family as the ideal model and want their children to experience all of the stability, love and guidance that comes from that.
Education: To prepare their children for life after Door of Faith. They want their children to have a strong education so that that when they move on from the orphanage they can be healthy and productive members of society.
Community Service: To live Christ’s example of a life of service. They want to give back to the local community through service, outreach and compassion. To love their neighbor as ourselves.
These three things, with a Biblical foundation, have made this orphanage what it is! The staff clearly loves the Lord with their whole heart and are doing an incredible job at loving the kids and raising them to be strong, fruitful members of society. I was so amazed by their wisdom in how to care for, provide, and raise up one hundred children! They are more than just doing it... they are doing it well, and giving God all the glory!
On the second to last night DJ took the time to sit down with our team and give us some advice. As a group of people committed to being involved in missions to one degree or another we were, of course, ecstatic. He told us two things that stood out to me in a big way.
The first was that, "You can't be something on the mission field that you haven't already lived out and practiced at home." What a good reminder that you aren't going to magically become someone who you aren't when your situation changes! I see myself thinking something along that line every now and then. I say to myself that I will learn to serve with joy when I am married; I will learn how to say, "Yes!" when all I really want to say is "NO!" when I am a mother. But the thing is, life doesn't work like that. God is using the circumstances and people in my life right now to teach me those kind of lessons, because they are lessons to be learned! Praise God that he loves me enough to constantly be conforming me to "the image of his son" (Rom. 8:29). It is nothing but pride to think that I will all of sudden get everything right when I am married, or a mother, or on the mission field. I am so thankful to God for using TJ to remind me of that!
The second thing he said was that, "Tragedy in the world's eyes is opportunity in God's eyes." And this was coming from a man with experience. He told us that, on average, DOFO is confronted with two major spiritual attacks a year. Whether it is a child dying, dissension among the staff, a natural disaster in the area, hard situations in a staff member's hometown, etc. Satan likes to hit them hard. And yet, He could honestly testify to God's grace and mercy in their lives, and praise him for what he has taught each of them and how each situation has impacted DOFO. It was so incredible to heart him say that!
On the last day we got up at 5 a.m. and drove about an hour to make/serve Breakfast at a church that faithfully feeds breakfast to around one hundred children six days a week. These children live on a dump. Some with their parents, some without. They make an average of $5 a day off gathering recyclables and turning them in. My heart broke as I saw these precious children hungrily wolf down as many plates of eggs and tortillas their tummies could fit because they could not be sure if they would get lunch or dinner that day. I spent a few minutes talking (with my small Spanish vocabulary) to two sisters and trying to get the embarrassed younger one to eat. I did the classic airplane-into-the-mouth technique, and her face lit up as I made funny faces and tried to sound like a jet. I felt so glad to have made her smile :)
After breakfast was over, we went outside and some of the kids decided to show us where they lived. The community has taken thousands of tires and used them as stairs, barriers, and anything else they can think of. Grass and plants have sprung up in the dirt that is in and around the tires, causing them to almost become a part of the hills. The slopes are covered in garbage and their homes are made out of everything from garage doors to sheets of metals. If it can be used to provide shelter, they are utilizing it. But beyond all that I saw something that most people wouldn't expect. Joy. As we played jump rope and "futball" with the children, it was clear that they were having a good time. We spoke to some men who attended the church and the smiles on their faces were so BIG! The men were actually in the process of slaughtering a pig, and thought it was great sport to watch the sheltered American's faces as they cut it's head off! I will spare you the gory details... ;-) These people don't have much beyond the bare necessities of food and shelter, but when it comes down to it they were happy. Seeing things like that give me little faith in the American standards for happiness- money, position, and things. Why would you waste time, money, and effort pursueing those worldly things when there are people who are living on $5 a day and are content?! It has been years since I realized that I don't want to live an average American life, and being with these beautiful settled the fact. I went hoping to bless them... but (like what usually happens when I go on a missions trip) they blessed me in a much bigger way. I will never forget those children or their families who, despite living on a garbage heap, have found joy <3>
