One Year Ago Today....

One year ago today we arrived in Siguatepeque, Honduras. After 23 days on the road and 4783 miles in “la fiesta bus” we finished the journey which had begun in Farmington, Maine on January 15^th, 2013. Truth be told, the journey actually began in 1981…maybe even as far back as 1964 when I first traveled to Guatemala at the age of six months. But I’ll start in 1981.

In 1981 I was seventeen, a shy, very awkward teenager who loved to read, to work and to travel. My family had moved to Maine from Kansas when I was five years old because my father had been offered a position at UMF as a physics professor. Later on, he became the pastor of a small church and when UMF laid him off he chose to stay in Maine rather than leave the church he was pastoring. After the Mariel Cuban boat lift in 1980, we became acquainted with several Cuban refugees and became involved in helping them adapt to their new lives here. My father and I even went so far as to travel to Havana, an almost unheard of event at the time, to see if we could help one of the men bring his wife and son to the US.

Antigua, with el Volcan Agua in the background 

As we became more involved with the Cubans, my father decided that we, as a family, should travel to Antigua, Guatemala to study Spanish for 4 months. He and I drove to Guatemala in a diesel VW Rabbit, crisscrossing Mexico in what became a truly epic adventure. The rest of the family arrived later by air. Those months spent in Central America were for me some of the richest moments in my life and awakened in me the person who I am today.

In 2007 when our church in Maine asked Barbe and me to plan and lead their first ever short-term missions trip, the destination was an easy choice for me. Central America! When we returned from that trip, the seed that had been planted back in 1981 had begun to sprout and by 2012 was in full bloom. Following a bumper year in business, we decided that as a family, we too would travel to Central America to study Spanish for two months. Instead of Guatemala, we chose Honduras having heard of the Spanish Language Institute which had only recently opened.

Upon our return to the States, we began to plan in earnest for a move to Honduras…for just a year or so. Well, here we are a year later and making plans to remain indefinitely. Why? Well, I’m glad you asked as Pastor Park always used to say.

Life. Freedom. Work. Missions. Friends. Love….

• Life…and that abundantly. I can honestly say that our life here in Honduras is abundant, rich and full. I literally have to pinch myself almost daily to make sure I’m not dreaming and that I will wake up and find myself back in my tractor trailer pounding down the road in a snow storm. But, it goes far deeper than that. Spiritually, relationally, emotionally, physical health, creativity, enthusiasm…every area of my life is more whole…and better…and richer for being here.

• The freedom we experience here is enormous. Freedom from a set schedule, freedom from the rat race, freedom from the many, many laws that regulate life in the USA, the so called “land of the free”. Freedom to live life on our own terms.

• I have not worked, as in I have not had a job that has generated any income in 14 months now, and amazingly, we are not broke. But I love to work, so it isn’t as though I have been doing nothing. Believe me, I have been busy. As I write this post, several days in advance, I am at 35,000 feet flying from San Pedro Sula to Tampa, FL for a meeting with Sawyer Products for whom I am their distributor in Honduras. From there, I will visit family in Florida and do a stm team training with our home church in Jacksonville who will be sending us a team in June. Drilling wells, managing two businesses and the language school (the same one where we studied 2 years ago), Bible Studies and the list goes on, keeps me busy.

• In a sense, every day here is a day of missions. Opportunity abounds to love others, to share out of our abundance, to do something as simple as give another person a ride or a glass of pure water, little things that I believe in God’s eternal plan really do make a difference.

• We have made many wonderful friends here, Honduran and Gringo alike. It is part of what makes our life abundant. As I watch our sons busy and engaged with other teens, I am happy and filled with gratitude. I watch my wife enjoying the company of other missionary women, taking part in Bible studies and sewing classes, finding time to digital scrapbook and I know that we are truly blessed. I too am blessed with friends who share like passions, who possess along with me the desire to make a difference in the world around us, both now and for eternity. Opening our house to the language school and to travelers who pass through Siguatepeque has broadened and widened our relationships and our horizons in innumerable ways. Blessed, blessed, blessed.  

• We have come to love this place, this country, this life and these people. It’s easy to be here when you love. Love covers over a multitude of sins…just like the good book says...and there are many. Honduras is not the Garden of Eden. Life here is not perfect, people here are not perfect and certainly there are risks involved to living here, but as we love others, that love is returned to us over and over again, time after time.  I’m thinking just now of Florencia, an elderly lady in the little church we attend. Poor, very poor, not much of a house, not much food in the pantry, but when Barbe and I visited her the other day she insisted on giving us half of the fresh picked black beans she was preparing for dinner. I couldn’t refuse even knowing that she could ill afford it. It was her way of showing her love for us.

What does the rest of the family think about staying? All of us are 100% in agreement. We stay. Mark of course will be graduating soon and will be making his own decisions on where his path leads, but staying in Honduras is not out of the question for him either.

Part of our decision to stay will depend on my ability to provide for our financial needs in the not too distant future. I am working on that now, hence my flight to Tampa and a probable trip to China in May, but I am confident that all our needs will be provided for, although I'm not sure what that actually looks like yet. Until then, we live, we enjoy life and trust God for the future...no matter where and what that will be!