Another Sermonette/Message from the Wellshire Guatemala Team

I am going to share a couple more of these sermonettes because they really drive home the power of Global Missions and the important work of organizations like Habitat for Humanity and Healing Waters International.

This one is from Ray Johnson. Ray has been a member of Wellshire for decades and he went on this trip with his whole family (wife and two kids.) The message is pretty self-explanatory, so enjoy!

WHY GUATEMALA?

Good morning. My name is Ray Johnson, and I had the privilege of being part of Wellshire’s recent trip to Guatemala. I have to be honest. The main reason I went on the trip to Guatemala is that my wife told me I had to. She really wanted our family to participate together in an international mission trip ... and it was a great idea. But, I had two questions prior to this trip that made me hesitant about doing an international trip:

The first was “Why Guatemala?” Why travel all that distance to another country when you can find many of the same problems we are going there to address, right down the street in our own city? This is a question I asked myself and it is a question I was repeatedly asked by others.

That question was answered for me while I was in Guatemala. See, there are approximately 13,000,000 Guatemalans … of those, approximately 1,000,000 are presently living in the United States, some legally, some illegally, seeking a better life for themselves and their families. They are here hoping to work and be able to send money back to their families so that their lives can be better in Guatemala. And Guatemala is just one country where this is happening.

I also learned that drug and gang violence was on the rise in Guatemala. I learned that many of the gang leaders there were “trained” in Los Angeles gangs and were deported back to Guatemala after they had been arrested. Back in Guatemala, they’ve carried on with what they know.

When you travel to a country like Guatemala, or any other country for that matter, and you listen to the people there, you realize that no matter how different we look, or what language we speak, or what our customs or living standards are, God created us all the same. We all need food and shelter, we want to love and laugh, we want a safe place to raise our families, and the list of similarities goes on. In short, they desire the very things that we desire.

So, I truly believe that a man in Guatemala, given the hope of decent housing, clean water and an education for his children would rather stay with his family in his native land than travel to the United States in hopes of being able to send some money back to make the lives of his family better in his absence.

So what occurred to me on this trip is that maybe, just maybe, some of the problems occurring right down the street here in Denver and in other cities in our nation are truly global problems that need a global solution; a global solution that starts by providing hope for people in nations like Guatemala.

The second question that kept gnawing at me prior to this trip was “can we really hope to make a difference?” After all, I just told you that there are 13,000,000 Guatemalans and 19 of us who traveled down there for one week. We talked about this after we arrived in Guatemala. Greg Allen-Pickett told a story that I had heard before, but had forgotten. I won’t forget it again.

The story is about a young boy walking along a beach. The beach is littered with thousands of starfish that had been washed up on the beach in a storm the night before. As you know, starfish don’t move very fast, and their chance of making it back to the water before the sun rose and killed them was slim. So the young boy was picking them up one by one and casting them back into the water. A man came along and asked the boy; what are you doing? There are starfish along this beach for as far as you can see in both directions (maybe 13,000,000 of them)… you can’t possibly make a difference! The boy bent over, picked up another starfish, cast it into the water, looked at the man and said, “I made a difference to that one!”

So now when I think about the 19 of us traveling to Guatemala and working for four days on a Habitat for Humanity house for a woman named Ester, I can’t help but think “we made a difference to that one”… A difference that will impact her, her daughters and her grand children and maybe provide that glimmer of hope.

So next time you hear that Wellshire is planning a global mission trip, don’t be like I was. Remember two things: 1. We really have become a global society that needs global solutions, and 2. Don’t be paralyzed into inactivity, globally or locally, by thinking, I can’t possibly make a difference.