I’d like to ask you to pause just for a moment and think about your home. 

Not just the house you live in. But everything else that causes you to call it HOME. 

What do you like about it? What would you like to improve? 

What factors help forge an attachment between you and your home? Physical factors, yes. But also think about the emotional, relational, and even spiritual factors.

Do you love your home?

And so, considering all the above, let me ask you one more question: what would it take to DISLODGE you from your home? That is, what would drive you OUT? 

I have lived in a lot of different homes in my life. And I can honestly say that in those situations where I had a choice in the matter (that is, times other than when I was a kid and the ‘rents said, “Guess what, kids! We’re MOVING!” Or later in life when my District Superintendent said, “Guess what, Russell! You’re MOVING!”),leaving one home to go to another has always been a VERY difficult choice. And that change has usually been caused by some kind of dramatic change of circumstance. 

And so, it should not have come as a surprise when our Guatemalan hosts told us that those same things are true about the people of Guatemala.

Just like us, they LOVE their homes. Just like us, they DON’T WANT to leave them.

The people of Guatemala live – as most of us do – in communities, surrounded by families and friends. They take pride in the homes they live in. They have favorite sports teams… favorite meals… favorite places to go play and relax. 

ALL they want to do is to put down roots there and BELONG.

That is, until they lose HOPE. Hope for now. Hope for the future.

You see, every HOME is built on HOPE. And when something happens that extinguishes hope, the whole idea of home is snuffed out, too. 

That’s when they come north. They come seeking the hope that is no longer available to them where they live. They come because they heard that the U.S. is a place of boundless hope for every person willing to work hard and play fair. 

They don’t want to come. They would much rather stay where they are with family and friends… with the customs and culture they grew up with… with the language they grew up speaking… with the food they know and the people they love. 

Just like anyone anywhere would. 

But they have also discovered that hope is like oxygen… no one can live without it. And when you can’t find oxygen HERE, you go seek it THERE.

The Psalmist makes a bold promise when he says, “For the needy shall not always be forgotten, nor the hope of the poor perish forever.” (Psalm 9:18, NRSV). But it is very hard to remember that promise when every day brings more hunger, more deprivation, more difficulty, less hope, and a dimmer and dimmer picture of the future. 

And so, we go. 

We go to Guatemala to plant seeds of hope. And as is true for any tree that begins life as a seed, we plant knowing that we might not live to see the full-grown, flourishing tree produced by that seed.

It is a process that can often seem long and thankless. But just last week I read this article in the Denver Post about another group of people planting seeds of hope in Guatemala. It helped me realize the truth of that Martin Luther King, Jr. quote that reminds us, “It is better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness.”

Here’s to more candles and more seeds in the world.

Abundant blessings;