December 28, 2014 "When Your Path Leads You to a Different World"

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By Allison Churchill

After driving through crowded streets with women wearing colorful skirts, balancing bundles with unknown contents, and children running alongside the bus while chasing one another, we arrived at Eagle’s Nest orphanage during the peak of the daily heat. Immediately we were greeted by the smiling faces of our hosts, Pedro and Felis, and several of the children living at the orphanage. There was no doubt that they were happy to meet us. They weren’t shy in their excitement and most of us were given hugs that could have squeezed the breath out of us.

Upon eating lunch with our hosts and getting the first glimpses of the grounds, Pedro began giving us an explanation of the birth of the orphanage and how God had led him to Guatemala and the children at the orphanage, whom he calls his own. For years previous, he had rebelled against God and the expectations of his Christian family of in-laws, and fought continuously to keep God shut out of his life for good. It wasn’t until his late thirties that he admitted to God that everything he had and would ever have truly belonged to Him, and that He could lead Pedro down the path that he was meant to travel from the very beginning. This plan was for Pedro to work in the lives of dozens of children by giving them agape love and so much more.

Pedro summarized his story with words with the same meaning as these: No matter how late in life it may happen, God works with you in specific ways and calls you in His time, which is always perfect. Now, at this time, at this place, and with these children, all of us on the United Youth Corps team have specifically been chosen by God Himself to serve and be served by these wonderful children of God. Though we are only human and therefore can never see the entire, beautiful picture that God created and oversees, we can have faith that He is working in us to change the lives of these children for the better, and that they will do the same for us. We only have to open our eyes, our minds, and our hearts in order to see for ourselves the priceless changes that are and will unfold before us.