A friend of mine, Betsy Hake, has been a missionary in Honduras for almost 40 years. About 20 years ago the Lord burdened her heart to present Christ and His love to those who are the least likely to ever walk into a church. Among those are the women and men prostitutes of Tegucigalpa and their children. Her organization is called Jericho Ministries. The following is taken from both an interview with her and her blog posting of July 24, 2015. It illustrates how God is at work in places we may not want to go.

I wondered why our neighbor left a large terra cotta pot at her back gate when she moved away. In time I would realize that it was cracked. But I didn’t see the flaw or the pot’s potential for a long time. Now I see that our neighbor left us a treasure.

About twenty feet from the pot I had planted a crepe myrtle tree. I spent hours each year pruning the limbs, watering the roots, and mowing around it. In June each summer the limbs hung heavy with vibrant purple blossoms. In the fall the blossoms turned to berry-like seeds.

In a recent church skit, a man named David played the part of Goliath. That irony set me to thinking, “Isn’t there a lesson here?  Did David become Goliath?”

There is something about danger that fascinates us. We are drawn to it. We know we shouldn’t be, but we are. And sometimes we live to regret that decision.

Someone has estimated that 15.4 million Americans were the victims of identity theft and fraud in 2016. Put at risk were financial accounts, credit health, job prospects, personal reputations, and even medical records. Using someone else’s personal information can allow thieves to take out loans, file tax returns, and pick up prescription drugs.

Butterflies are beautiful, but fragile. In fact, it has been said that if you touch a butterfly’s wings the creature may actually die. In the past few years, biologists have discovered why that’s true. If you catch a butterfly and release it, you will see a bright yellow or green iridescent dust on your hand. That shining dust is critical to the butterfly’s ability to fly. Without it, it cannot live.

Children can teach us a lot, especially young children. I learned something last fall by watching a landscaper and his four-year-old son. The father was unloading bales of pine straw, breaking them up, and spreading large handfuls around bushes and flowers. He quickly spread a thick layer of loose straw around all the plants, without covering them up. His son snatched a tiny handful of straw from a broken bale, dropped it close to a flower, then gleefully rushed back to get another handful. He repeated this over and over. The smile on the boy’s face and the shine in his eyes made it evident that he was proud to be helping his father with his landscaping.

Every journey, every venture, every project has three stages: beginning, middle, and end. In the beginning there is the promise of adventure and the quest of the unknown. At the end there is a sense of accomplishment. But in the middle, that is where the whole experience can just seem like a lot of work. Things are not so new anymore and the end seems far away. That’s when we are all tempted to stop halfway through and settle for less than we had hoped for. But if we do that, we miss God’s best for us.

One day my wife, Debi, and I were startled by a bumping noise coming from somewhere behind the clothes dryer. The noise would make repetitive bumps and then stop for a time and start back. I pulled the dryer out from the wall and disconnected the cord from the outlet.

Years ago, a construction foreman lost his job because he would not substitute cheaper materials for the ones called for in the blueprint. The project manager was cutting corners to pad the owner’s pocket. The foreman did not challenge the company in court. He lost his income, but gained a reputation for being honest. He forgave the one who persecuted him.

Recently I visited an elderly friend (let’s call her Adeline) in a well-to-do suburb. Adeline is a widow, living alone in a four-bedroom two-story home. Being over 85, she seldom trudges up the fifteen steps to the upper floor. But she is not really alone. Adeline has neighbors.  

Years ago a bumper sticker became popular that stated, “God is my copilot.”  On the positive side, that message shows us that we are to work side by side with the Lord in all things and trust Him completely. That is certainly true. On the negative side, it seems to indicate that God is here to assist us with our plans. 

When a wildfire sweeps across the scrub oak, sandy land of north Florida, south Alabama, and south Georgia many small animals find a place to hide, thanks to a creature called the gopher tortoise. This tortoise, about fifteen inches long and weighing eight to fifteen pounds, loves to dig in the sand. His front feet are like shovels. His back feet are strong and sturdy. Consequently, he can create large burrows. One in north Florida left a burrow that was 26 feet deep and 65 feet long. But that project was huge.

Canadian Cecilia Wessels of Three Hills, Alberta was awakened from her nap on June 2, 2017, by her nine-year-old daughter warning her that something strange was in the sky. She went to the backyard to see a huge funnel cloud churning up dirt about a mile away. Picking up the camera, she snapped some photos of the tornado to send to her parents in South Africa. The photos showed something else. Her husband, Theunis, was in the backyard mowing the grass.

In 1954, when I was five years old, I had a friend about my age who lived nearby. Let’s call him Johnny. Nearby was about a quarter of a mile away on a dirt road in Macon County, Alabama.

For months, Johnny and I had a good time playing with marbles, blocks, and little plastic trucks in the sand. Then something terrible happened. I had a birthday.

I watched a movie recently called The 33. It is the gripping dramatization of the 68 days that 33 miners spent trapped in a collapsing mine in Chile in 2010. One thing that enabled these men to survive was their ability to reach “the refuge” through the falling debris. The refuge was a large room with a table, benches, and some semblance of food, water, and medical supplies. By severely rationing their little water and a few cans of fish, they held out there for the seventeen days it took someone to drill a hole through 2,300 feet of very hard rock. The tunnels around them continued to crumble. The mountain, itself, kept moving.

Is curiosity a good thing? Is it wise to try out new ideas? Sometimes.

When I was about ten years old our science class studied the way mold spores grow in damp, dark places. The teacher suggested that we put some water on a slice of bread and put it in a dark place for a week. We were to check on it each day and record our observations.

We have all had to deal with detours in our lives, and not just on the highway. Detours are usually unexpected, unavoidable, and inconvenient. They are situations or events that take us in a different direction than the route we had planned. They can send us miles away from our goals and completely derail our time schedules. But sometimes they are a blessing, the means of God’s grace.

I have noticed that some people are list makers and some are not. Some folks make a detailed grocery list before going to the store, while others get there and wander down every aisle. List makers are trying to be efficient, trying to do more in less time. So, they plan ahead.

I recently saw an exhibit called “Transformart” at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts. The exhibit is expansive. As you enter the three-room panorama of tropical animals and plants you hear the sounds of a waterfall and birds chattering. The centerpiece is a twenty-five-foot tree made from clothes. As you look around, you see that everything is created from items that most of us discard. There is a life-like sheep of computer cables and a giant bird of shoe laces. The neck and head of a giraffe made of broken pencils protrudes from the wall above you. Perhaps the most startling creatures of all are the animals created from hundreds of empty ammunition shells.