Of dumpsters, plastic bottles and miracles

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.