I think it was on the last day we were working at the
technical school that we passed the dumpster.
It had been there for years and I’d probably passed it dozens of times
in my visits to Honduras. It was
unremarkable except when occasionally occupied by the ubiquitous carrion birds that
live and feed in the city of Tegucigalpa.
This time it was not birds in the dumpster but three young
boys. Actually, only one was actually in
the dumpster fishing for food or anything useful. The other two were passing back and forth a
plastic bottle which was doing a serviceable impression of a futbol. One had on a ratty shirt, the other had no
shirt. Both were wearing old flip-flops
that were falling apart as they made plays.
I was struck by how similar these boys were to the boys I
had just left at the El Hogar elementary school. They were about ten and moved, played and
laughed just like the kids I had just been playing with back at school. Apart from their clothes, they could easily
have passed for three of our boys. Why weren’t
they?
This is my question every time we come here. El Hogar houses, feeds and educates about 250
children. It’s an amazing story probably
familiar to everyone reading this blog,
but it’s not enough. For every
one of our children, scores more still live on the street, dig through
dumpsters, play with plastic bottles – on a good day. It is sad and spiritually taxing – little kids
shouldn’t have to win the El Hogar lottery to get three squares, a bed and an
education. Especially when the alternative
is the harsh and cruel street life of begging, gangs, drug addiction, violence
and even death.
Every time I come to El Hogar I bring a book to read. Sometimes it is just escapist potboilers or
spy thrillers. This time I brought a
book my friend Marie Johnson recommended to me because she heard I wanted to be
a disaster chaplain. It is Kate
Braestrup’s moving spiritual memoir, Here If You Need Me. Braestrup was one of the first chaplains
assigned to the Maine Warden Service and in addition to telling beautiful
stories of Maine’s search-and-rescue workers, she also manages to pen a
breathtakingly good essay on miracles.
I bring this up because we often talk about El Hogar in
terms of miracles. El Hogar is a
miraculous place. A place where God’s
kingdom is at work. A place where lives
are transformed – not just the children, but the staff and those of us who
visit. But what does it really mean to
name what happens at El Hogar as a miracle?
Miracles are sometimes thought of as extremely unlikely
events – an unexpected cure to a deadly disease, a traffic accident averted, a
timely and unexpected windfall that saves the day. In that sense, El Hogar is a miracle for all
these kids, because their attendance is a very unlikely event. Most kids who need El Hogar don’t get to go.
But Braestrup argues that there is much more to it than
that. “A miracle is not defined by an
event. A miracle is defined by
gratitude,” she writes. “Anything could
happen, but only one thing will. If it
is what we desire, what we long for so badly we feel it burning in our bones,
if by chance it is given, we will fall on our grateful knees, praise God, and
call it a miracle. And we will not be
wrong.”
So, today I will be grateful and call El Hogar a miracle. I will give praise and thanks to a God who
made the staff who so lovingly cares for the children. I will give thanks to all of us who have loved
the school and given our time, talent and treasure to sustain it. And I will
give thanks for the children themselves – for those who are at El Hogar, and
those who should be. For their ability
to bear unspeakable burdens and still find joy in the simple act of playing
with a surrogate soccer ball.
Braestrup again writes with accuracy and wisdom: “Sometimes
a miracle is a life restored, but the restoration is always temporary. At other times, maybe most of the time, a
miracle can only be the resurrection of love beside the unchanged fact of
death.”
Death is all around in Honduras in the form of gangs, corruption, murder and cruel, cruel poverty. But it is also filled with the “resurrection
of love” in the form of a tiny school in the center of its capital city called
El Hogar, and in the form of two boys playing soccer by a dumpster.
