It Is All About Thanksgiving

We have fish!!

When I got home there was so much stuff going on.  I hadn't been home for several weeks and there was a lot that I needed to attend to.  But the main thing was to attend to the girls.

Thanksgiving is the girls most favorite time of the year.  The girls made construction paper turkey's out of hand prints, and wrote Thank you notes to sponsors.  The kitchen was decorated with orange and red plastic table cloths and it looked absolutely  wonderful.  Anna Smith, Lauren Edwards and Linda Botkins were in charge of the decorating details.  We invited the workers and some of them brought families with them.  We invited a great group of folks.  The only problem was we gave them the wrong Thursday!  So we had to re-invite for a week earlier, which was less than a week's notice.  We had several people call and apologize why they couldn't come.  The girl's heart were set and so we didn't change our schedules. We found two turkeys in the market.  They were small and our group was supposed to be very large.

 One of our goats that we are raising was asked to make the ultimate sacrifice.  We moved the younger girls to the mission house to watch a Christmas movie so they wouldn't be traumatized.  I personally don't handle the slaughter side of our meat supply.  I don't like to hear the gun go off and some of our girls, older and younger, feel the same way.  I usually turn that over to the guys, who happen to be on the farm. This year it was Jerimiah Botkin and sons.  I don't mind dealing with the meat after the deed has been done.  But because I was cooking the day before on Wednesday, our older girls stepped forward and got the job handled, and the goat was ready to cook.

Linda Botkin was in charge of baking pies. She made lemon, pumpkin and pecans (I had them hidden in the ice maker that is not hooked up).   We had mustard greens growing from seeds donated from a seed store in Doerun, GA, and zucchini casserole, cornbread dressing,(not to be confused with Yankee stuffing that goes inside of a turkey, eckh!)  mashed potatoes, gravy and Angela made the yeast rolls. We had heavenly hash, and lots of real South GA sweet tea.

Even with the wrong dates we still had tons of folks, but you have to realize when the staff, workers and children get together, we are about 70 people, We had some court officials, some of our girls who have graduated from our farm, but come back for the holidays, and local people we just asked at the last minute.  I never really know how many will show up.

Who needed a football game to watch after the feast, when we could play kickball ourselves? It was a great game.  We all had such a huge day. But it was not over.  After our guest and fellow athlete's left, we got everything ready to go to the mission house to continue the festivities.

At lunch we eat Heavenly Hash.  The supper is comprised of pies and more pies.  While we are preparing to eat pies, the kids decorate the Christmas tree.  We give each child about 4 ornaments to place on the tree after Kansas and Angie Serritt got the lights up and working.  It doesn't take long when you have 33 girls with 4 ornaments.  It reminded me of the cartoon, "Charlie Brown's Christmas, when they decorated the ugly tree.  They stand around and furiously place their ornaments in a few minutes, voila' a perfectly finished tree.

Now our tree is pretty ugly.  This artificial tree has been around for a lot of years.  It is the type that used to be color coded.  The branches have lost long lost their color coded stickers on the end of the metal hanger.  The trunk, or center of the tree that the metal hangers hook on to are missing some key items.  But we strategically hide those from view and use a ton of lights.  I think the tree is just held together by wrapping extension cords and strings of lights to keep the branches of the tree in place.  The effect is quite nice.

After the tree we eat our pies, and then prepare to play secret friend.  Secret friend is so much fun for the girls.  We each get a name to buy a gift for.  The girls have to raise money by doing odd jobs around the house.  The limit is about 50 limps or $2.50 .  The girls take the secret very seriously.  I don't know why we call it secret friend because with all these girls it is hard to keep anything a secret but they really ponder over what they want to buy for their secret pal.  We all had the best time.

The Thanksgiving Party Animals

Rosey and Mary 

We had a graduations to attend in November.  Rosey graduated High School, and we had 6 other girls to graduate from the 6th grade.  WE were so proud of all of them.

WE had several Birthdays in November along with everything else that was going on.  So we decided to go for the big one.  We went to the beach for the day.  We hired a bus, and left at 4:30 in the early morning and drove to the Caribbean.  Many of the girls had never seen the ocean at all.  When they got there first face full of water, they marveled at the saltiness of the water.  They kept asking "Why is this water salty".  We ate a a local restaurant and got back on the bus, and headed for the long way home.

Finally, we got the fish for our fish pond and we are thankful!!.  David Aguilar a local farming engineer, brought us some fish to put in our cement pond.  We were all so excited.  WE will see how fast they grow off.  We were told that it would take a while because growth for fish is slow in cold water.  In the hot areas of Honduras the fish grow at an amazing speed.

I have found it to be true in my walk with God too.  We all tend to grow spiritually when the heat is turned up.  We begin to look to the only one who can bring that perfect peace when are eyes are focused on Him and we trust in Him.

I want to thank everybody that helped this month turn out to be such a successful time for the girls.  I want to thank, the members of our staff, our workers, and our board in Honduras and the board in the States who have stood beside us all the way.  We see the lives of the girls changing so fast. Thanks to all of you who have been blessing us by praying for our girls and the ministry that God has established. I want to maintain a thankful heart.

I pray you all have a blessed holiday season. The Holiday-Happening Honduran Mom

PS  We have a new girl.  She is 6 and her name is Maite.  Please be praying for her to get established here and that it will be a smooth transition.

Our Graduate

Coming Home For a Wedding

Benjamin and Charity Noethe 

The Bride and Groom

People ask me all the time, "How often do you come home?"

It seems to me that I am always at home.  I am in the United States right now and I am home. When I am in Honduras I am home.  When people ask me in Honduras "Where is home?", I say "Georgia".  When I am in the States and ask me, "When do I go home?", I know they mean Honduras.  It is kind of cool that where ever I am I am content being at home while longing to be at home.  It is just the life of a missionary  and a child of God.

If you ask a child, who is in a missionary family, where they are from they will respond with "What do you mean"? But home is where their families are.

People also ask me "How many kids do you have?"  Well I have 5 grown grown children here in the States and over forty in Honduras, that I have been mothering for  the past 18 years and that call me Mom.  Being a Mom is not something that you just turn on and off.  It is not what you do it is who you are and your calling is from God.  I also happen to be a missionary which also by definition means that you don't lay aside that calling either like so many car keys on the coffee table at the end of the day.  That calling is 24/7 and rightly so.  You shouldn't be able to take it off and say that you are a missionary or a mom between the hours of 8:00 -5:00. You are always "on", it just goes with the territory.

When I was called into the mission field I was concerned naturally about my 

"natural" children.  God assured me that if I would take care of his kids he would take care of mine.  Scripture tells that God is not a man that He should lie.  He has been faithful to His promise to me.  I now have three of my five children married to the most wonderful christian spouses here and I have girls in Honduras who have married godly men.  I have girls who have graduated from college and are attending college here and there.  I have children in Honduras who are not exactly where they want to be and kids that are struggling with a lot of things. but I stand on God'promise to me that they will all come home

Moms and Dads have the amazing task of making s child understand what "home" is.  With the holidays cranking up this month, many people are already speaking about their plans to go "home" for the Holidays.  Somebody had to create that sense  of home in their hearts.  Sometimes home is a physical place and sometimes it is just a sense of being, but we all have that longing to be home.  We have that feeling lodged in our spiritual DNA placed there by God.  Everybody has it.  

I work with girls who have come from fractured homes.  They come in to our mission and we encourage, instruct, and love on the girls, who have been placed in our care.  The hard part is that their sense of home carries pain.  It is all they have known about a place called home.  So many of our girls who have come out of dangerous situations still want to go home, because it is home.  It makes no sense why they would want to return, but the desire to have their home is ever present.  

I am thankful I got to come home for my daughter's wedding.  We had a great time with family and friends at her showers, and making plans for her big day.  She did really well getting all her arrangements made with only having a small meltdown over her limitations on invitations.  

She had a lot of wonderful help from her future mother-in-law and a group of her friends, as well as a bunch of help from the groom and his dad along with his friends.  These folks made decorations, planned showers, cooked for the multitudes, and worked like crazy to help pull everything together to make this wedding all that Charity and Ben had dreamed it would be.

One of the things I was asked to do is to help Anna Robertson, the decorator.  We went around scoping out people's yards that I knew, to be able to cut flowers and greenery to put in the arrangements for the wedding. The day came for me to start cutting.  I borrowed my mom's clippers and took the borrowed car that a great family always provides me with while I am home, and loaded it up with enormous  black trash bags that I borrowed from my Dad's shop.  

At first I was clipping nicely away at the hedges in my yard.  Then I found out I needed a lot more of everything.  So I was asking people from Moultrie to Thomasville for clippings from their yards and their neighbors.  I had no shame about it  I was walking in the woods with my boots on, ever mindful that there were snakes out and about.  I was in the roadside ditches cutting wild flowers ahead of the DOT tractors who were cutting down the grass in the ditches.  I was on a mission.  I stopped at one house of a family I used to know to ask if I could cut some of their pampas grass flowers.  I thought the young couple must be her grown-up son living in her old house.  The coupled assured me that they thought if would be fine.  I grabbed my long handled cutters and was on my way when they said, " I am sure the owners wouldn' t mind.  I got nervous about that last little comment.  I went to large houses with manicured grounds.  I went to mobile homes that had wild pyracantha growing in their overgrown hedges.  Towards the end of my clipping fiesta, I ran out of containers and bags and I was just cramming the clippings in the trunk of the car and slamming the trunk.  The last time I closed the trunk , surveying all of my labors, I wondered how all that bunch of twigs, branches, and seed pods could be arranged to look worth a flip, but I was just doing what I was asked to do by the decorator.

When I arrived with my last load of cuttings, the Master Decorator had already been at work with the stuff from the big black bags and buckets.  The arrangements she made were magical.  I just was amazed at what she had done with the what she had asked me to bring to her.  I realized at that moment is that is what God asks us to do.  He asks us to go to the hedges and the highways and sometimes in the ditches where the snakes are, to bring those things to Him that he asked for so that He can arrange them into something we could never imagine.  He is after all the Master Decorator.

So I now have a married daughter.  They ceremony was beautiful and everything was perfect, the food, the flowers, the bride, the groom.  They now will make their home together.   Every time we get participate in a wedding it should remind us of the great preparation that God is making for His bride.  He is trimming some of us and collecting others to be a part of something that will be so amazing .

I want to thank God for everybody he sent to help us with the wedding, or prayed for us before the wedding .  Thanks to Joe Reynolds, Angela Serritt and my interns for watching over my Honduran home while I was away.  Most of all I am thankful that I got to come home to be a part of something that I have prayed for a long time. Blessings, the Hedge Clipping and Snipping Honduran Mom