Day Three: Rain, Rebar, and a Rowdy Church Service

Breakfast 7:30 | Home Build 9:00 | Lunch Program 11:30 | School Devo/Prayer 1:00–2:30 | Ronnie's Church 4:00 | Dinner 8:00

This morning, while I was spending time with the Lord, I looked up just in time to watch a wall of rain come marching sideways across the mountain toward Las Ermitas. It wasn't drifting in, it was advancing. I remember thinking, "Lord, we're going to need a bigger poncho."

He didn't send one. He sent a rainbow instead, which, if I'm honest, felt like a bit of a flex. Not one of those faint little suggestions of color that makes you wonder if you're imagining it. A real one. Bold enough to stop conversations. It stretched across the valley while the rain was still falling, as if God wanted to remind us before the day even began that His promises don't wait for the storm to pass, they shine right through it. You couldn't have staged it with a Hollywood budget. Dark clouds. Driving rain. A ribbon of color hanging over the mountains of Honduras. God has a way of preaching sermons before anyone ever steps behind a pulpit.

After breakfast, we drove about twenty-five minutes to the community of Tablón to build a house. If you've followed these trips over the years, you know the process. Families often wait as long as three years for their name to be called, and they must already own the land before they can even qualify. Imagine waiting that long, wondering if today might finally be your day.

Today, it was Oni's.

Oni is pictured with the groceries at her feet

Oni is a single mother, building on a piece of land where multiple generations of her family already live. Today, after years of waiting, it was finally her turn. As we sat with her, prayed over her, and explained what this home represented, she kept wiping away tears, the kind that don't need a translator.

If you gave to this trip, whether it was $5 or $50 at our taco fundraiser, this is your receipt. Your generosity became walls. It became a roof. It became a woman who couldn't stop crying because, for the first time in a long time, tomorrow looked different than yesterday.

Then Oni said something that has stayed with me all day. She has already trusted Christ as her Savior. When we asked how we could pray for her, she didn't ask for furniture. She didn't ask for more money. She asked us to pray that her parents would come to know Jesus.

That stopped me. We came to give her a physical house, four walls and a roof, and she immediately started thinking about her family's eternal one. Pastor Misa had shared the gospel with Oni and the Manolito family that morning, reminding us that every house we build is meant to point beyond itself. These homes aren't the foundation. They provide shelter from the rain, but they can't shelter a soul. Jesus is preparing something no hurricane can damage, no bank can foreclose on, and no passage of time can wear out.

"In my Father's house are many rooms... I go to prepare a place for you." (John 14:2)

Partway through the build, the rain returned, but this time nobody flinched. It was a welcome kind of cool rain, exactly what everybody needed with the sun as hot as it has been. The whole crew just kept working, hammers and shovels going, huge drops falling all around them like nobody had told their bodies to notice. It reminded me of watching a piece of food hit the ground and an army of ants descend on it in seconds, except in reverse. Ants take something apart.

Today, in the middle of the rain, a small army of us was putting something together, board by board, wall by wall, for a family who had been waiting for someone to show up. Today we helped build one small house in Honduras. Jesus is still preparing the one that will last forever.

Risa del Sur Elementary

From there we headed back ot the feeding kitchen to give lunch ot the 100 or so children gathered. Afterwards we walked to Risa del Sur Elementary School, where we talked to the kids about respecting those in authority over them, parents, teachers, principals, and how that respect is actually training wheels for something bigger: learning to trust the authority of God Himself. We prayed over every classroom, over the teachers, over the principal, and in the middle of that prayer time, one of the teachers accepted Jesus as his Savior. Let that sink in for a second. We showed up to encourage teachers, and left having watched heaven throw a party over one of them. Keep praying that they are willing to receive the Gospel and for In the Midst as they continue to minister to these wonderful educators.

Then, because apparently we needed comic relief squeezed between two miracles, we held a trash-collecting contest on the playground. I have never seen elementary kids move that fast for anything that wasn't a longer recess. In roughly ten minutes, they filled five full bags of trash, sprinting, diving, negotiating trades ("you take the plastic, I got the wrappers"), like tiny competitive garbage collectors with something to prove. It was chaos. It was glorious. And it was its own quiet little sermon: give people, even eight-year-olds, a clear goal and a reason to care, and they will move mountains…or at least clear a playground, in the time it takes most adults to finish a coffee break. (The promised Ring Pops didn’t hurt our cause either.)

Then came Pastor Ronnie's church at four o'clock, and friends, buckle up. The roads getting there were smooth enough, but the service itself was a full-throttle thrill ride from the first note. The music was loud and alive, and Ronnie preached like a man who had personally been given twelve extra shots of espresso and a deadline.

“Hallelujah” could be heard reverberating throughout the neighborhood. I still don't know how our translators kept pace with him. I watched them the whole time, and I'm convinced they weren't translating so much as surfing, catching each wave of his sentences right before it crashed and somehow riding it all the way to shore in English. If translating for Ronnie isn't a spiritual gift, it should be added to the list in 1 Corinthians 12.

Even better, Clay had let me know earlier in the day that he was willing to share his testimony as well. He was succinct and honest without losing the rawness of a young man on a journey to find his church family and a deeper walk with Christ.

Then Rowen spoke on Matthew 6 and the truth that we, as believers, are cared for by a heavenly Father who cares for us more than the sparrows.

Here is the truth I keep circling back to tonight.

Everything we did today, laying block in the rain, praying over a principal's office, chasing wrappers across a playground, hanging on for dear life in Ronnie's service, was really the same thing wearing different clothes. Peter tells us that we, "like living stones, are being built up as a spiritual house" (1 Peter 2:5).

Today we built one physical house for Oni, and watched God build a couple of spiritual ones in real time, one teacher, one classroom, one family's prayer request at a time. The rain didn't stop any of it. If anything, it just made the work a little more memorable, and the rainbow at the end made sure we wouldn't forget who gets the credit.

Tomorrow we do it again. Pray for Oni's parents. Pray for that new believer standing in front of a classroom tomorrow morning, figuring out what it means to follow Jesus in front of thirty kids who already love her. And pray for Ronnie's translators. They earned it.

Until All Have Heard, Pastor Mark