There Is a Season Under Heaven

The TEAM season has officially started. Although we have already had some teams this year, we are moving into our Season.  We have had a super great week!  We have our Spanish Club team from St Louis.  This is the fourth year in a row they have been at our mission.   They go to the communities and do outreach ministries, like bringing rice from Children Against Hunger and dramas, and all the while they are practicing their Spanish.  All night all day they just have fun with the girls.  We were eating lunch today and the group start a song, "The Lion Sleeps Tonight". 

They started out by coughing and then they started using the kitchen tables as their drums and off they went.  The girls don't exactly know what to make of these guys sometimes, but they wouldn't miss a thing.

The Cumi CAFE bakery is moving into a new season.  WE  have our wood carvers bringing their art into the store side of the bakery.   WE will sell their jewelry boxes and frames with our coffee and pine straw baskets.  All these products are made here in Yamaranguila. Our ministry is trying to help the single moms and the youth of our area to sell their art to our teams to help them raise funds for their families.

Cumi CaFe still has the delicious cinnamon rolls, which are the big hit with everyone from team members to the local people. WE even sell our rolls in La Esperanza!  Our coffee picking season is over.  WE are now just cooking the coffee and bagging it in airtight bags for our teams. A group of students from Anderson University, bought us a coffee grinder and sealer to help us get our coffee business established.  If you would like some our our coffee, check out our website:  ptchonduras. org.  We have been selling our coffee Cafe Cumi and are increasing our clientel everyday.  The girls have learned a lot working at the bakery and they also will get credit hours in their school for establishing a micro-business. 

Sunday, Angie Serrit is starting a new season in her life.  Angie has been working as a volunteer for us for almost two years.  She got her visa this week and so Angie and her husband, Kansas will leave to go to the States.  It was a time we knew was coming, but boy, it has been so hard to see them go.  Angie grew up here on the farm.  She went to college and then met Kansas as an adult.  They knew of each other years ago here in Honduras.  He had been in Honduras on a construction team 10 years before, while she was just a young girl.   They got married November 2011.  We have loved having her here, working, laughing, planning so many things, and loving on the girls these almost two years.  She was so faithful about her work ethic and faithful towards the girls as an oldest sister but mainly faithful to God.  She and Kansas waited patiently for her visa to be processed.  She wrote today and she has it in her hands.  I am thrilled that she finally has her visa to the United States, but I am going to miss her like crazy (Me and the girls).  I know God is going to bless her because she gave her time and her energy to help with these girls here at PTC.  She loves the girls here and the ones yet to be here.  She and Kansas have been a huge source of help in so many ways.  Please pray for them to have a super safe trip and a wonderful life in the United States.  Thanks for serving .    

WE got a couple of new girls.  One is going to be here for a temporary season and the other is more of a long term.  I keep telling myself that I am going to limit the girls we accept by age, or situation, but if God has sent them to me, I usually just let them stay.  Out of all the thousands of girls that could be here, I only have a handful of girls.  It is really amazing to know that God hand picks these girls to be here for this time.  Some have been here for 15 years and some on for a short season, but they all have heard the Gospel and felt loved and safe while they were here. 










It is hard to know the depth of a child's hurt who has been wounded to the core.  I have been in prayer over these two girls.  They are both so special, and I am calling on God for wisdom and special insight on how to minister to them.  Please pray for me about the new ones.  They are truly,  precious in His sight.  Sometimes, when we get a new girl, the children who have been here for a while, remember the reason why they are here. It is a emotional situation for everyone.  I have witnessed the lives of our girls have been transformed just living here in a safe environment and listening to the message of the gospel.  The love they experience from the staff,  each other,  and the teams that come down to share the love of Jesus is really healing to all of us. It brings hope to them. Sometimes though, those past memories loom overhead like a dark winter snow cloud. Those girls pull an invisible cloak around their emotions and their memories and it is difficult to minister to them. I called a meeting of the girls this afternoon, just to encourage them to reach out to the new girls as others have reached out to them.  I also reminded them that there is absolutely nothing they can do to change their past or the anybody's past, except to walk in forgiveness to the ones who disappointed them or wounded them.  They can be free.  Please pray for us. 

This is a tribute to Angie and Kansas that Angie helped them to learn .

Coffee picking season is over

This is our girls at our 2nd annual beach trip to Omoa that we took earlier this  February 

 To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.  Ecc. 3:1-2

I thank the Lord for the seasons in my life.  So much has happened this year, I can hardly express everything I have been able to see, do and experience. There has been a season to plant,  a season of mourning, a season of joy, a season of weeping and a season for laughter and a season to dance. Seasons of change. A season of faith and trust.  The word season is used in cooking too.  It just makes what your working with more flavorful. I trust God to put just the right seasoning on all of here in PTC.  

 I thank God for calling me here to Honduras and to His children.  Sometimes, I feel like they are mine, but He has to remind me that they are His first.  I love this mission.  Sometimes, I think it is mine, but He again gently reminds me that it was and is HIS vision and not mine to begin and continue with this mission.  Pray for me and His girls.  Blessings, the Seasoned Honduran Mom

Heal me...

So I have been traveling a lot this last few months.  Many of you know that my youngest brother, David, died unexpectedly this month from a heart attack.  I came home immediately to be with my family.  I have a huge family here in Honduras, but I have a big family in the United States.  There were 8 children in our family.  WE had never really had anyone from our immediate family die.  I prayed as I went home that I would be able to share something with the whole group that would make them know Christ more or that their hearts would be revived to experience that love from when they first believed.  I had an opportunity as we were sharing at the memorial service, but I just shared about my memories and the love that I had for my brother, as many others shared that same love for him.  It was not just in those things he did, but for who he was, a kind gentle man who just loved everybody, except for people who drove to slow or who talked on cell phones while they were driving in front of him. I loved the memorial service and the testimonies that we shared about David.   He shared his conversion with me years ago, when he was a young man. I had shared with David over the years about my heart for him.  I encouraged him to go to church, not because he needed to, but because the church need him to be there.  He had so much to offer.  He was just a kind man that did things behind the scenes, and was always ready to help someone and was always ready to give someone a serious hug.  

When you experience a death in the family it causes you to reflect on what is going on in your life.  Because of all the travel, back and forth to Honduras, I have to listen to the schepeel at the beginning of the flight about the importance of using your seat belts and your seat being a flotation device and that if the cabin of the aircraft loses pressure, a mask will fall down in front of you and you need to place the mask over you nose and mouth and breathe normally. (which I don't know how you would breathe normally when you were in a crisis 10,000 ft in the air)  Then after you have your face mask in place then  help if necessary help the person beside you.  I think while I was home for the funeral, I was dealing with fumbling around with getting my own mask on that I really was able to help anyone else struggling with their mask.  I couldn't breathe normally because I was in a crisis.

When I got back home to Honduras, the girls were already on the beach trip that we had planned for them.  I had time to walk the beach and seek God about my healing my heart.  After everything that happened, I have been really seeking God about my life and my love relationship with Christ.  I have been a missionary for 20 years now.  Our official time here at this mission will be 20 years in 2015.  So much has happened in these 20 years.  So you would think as a Christian missionary that I would have all of this together.  There is so much going on here all the time. NO day is the same.  Everyday has large challenges. Many have asked how I do everything I do everyday.  I even ask myself that almost at the end of everyday and my response is the same every night when I put my head on my pillow, as I am reflecting over my day that I function here only through God's power and His grace.  There simply is no other explanation about how I accomplish things here.  When I try in my own effort of works, I come up woefully short on every count.  I have learned to give God the first part of my morning.  During that time I ask Him to be with me in my day and help me at every turn and He does.  He is faithful and He helps me get everything accomplished that I need to get done for the girls and the community in which I live. When I get in a hurry in the morning, or have a crisis and don't do what I know to do about looking to Him to get my day started, it is a disaster on every point.  So I have learned to depend on Him, and that is good, but get so accustomed to my morning routine, I have left something important out, which is my love relationship in Christ.

Marriage is mentioned in scriptures about how it is like a mystery to our relationship with Christ.  I was married for 35 years.  During that time we learned to depend on one another and we loved one another and functioned well together as a team making our plans for the day. My husband and I were super great missionaries. We accomplished so much here.  But I found out that sometimes in our familiarity with each other, some love areas were not attended to.  We took our love for granted. That is where I find myself right now in my life with Christ.  He is there for me, and He helps me attend to everything that I have need of, but I am so assured He helps me in the areas that I need doing the mission here, that I assumed when something like the crisis of my brother's death came at me, it took me totally by surprise.  My routine that I had with Christ was broken.

So, I am at the point that I don't want God to be my routine.  He has been faithful and I praise Him for the lovingkindness that He has shown to me and to the girls here at Project PTC.  But because any of life's  unexpected situations, I could find myself scrambling like I did this month,.  There is a song that God reminded me of from years ago.  It is called Heal Me by Aaron Jeoffery   The whole song is anointed but this is just the chorus, but expresses the place I find myself.

Heal me
Heal my eyes
Heal this heart
Heal my mind
Breathe your breath of life
Wake my soul from this sleep
Give me back the joy of when I first believed
Heal me..

I don't want to waste another minute
Taking all your love for granted
I just want to feel your Holy Spirt
Rushing over me..

If I had been where I needed to be, walking in the flow of His love, I could have expressed the love of Christ completely to my family.  My heart was for them to be healed and have His breath of life poured over them.  I would have had my oxygen flowing over me and I might could have been a little more effective to help them with their masks.
 I pray that I won't waste anymore time taking His love for granted.  It is good to know you are loved, but there is a lack of love on our part in knowing this,  we just take it for granted and not keep our focus from where this love evolves. Pray for me that I keep my focus on the source of that Love. That I would pray without ceasing to Him.  Love is the only thing that will remain after this world is no more.  I want to make sure that I keep breathing deeply from the source and be able to share it with others here in my Honduran Home as well as my home in the States.  Blessings, the Healing Honduran MOM