Location:
A Remote Village in the Mountains of Honduras
An Abandoned Wycliffe Compound
Miles from any road bigger than a two-track.
There he sat.
A boy about eight years old.
At the top of the hill overlooking a Wycliffe compound.
He pulled at the grass and fiddled with the earth while watching us, and, I think unknown to him, in my view.
About thirty of us sat in an early morning meeting huddled on benches set in a circle.
Doctors, nurses, child ministry workers, and teen translators gathered that morning first for Scripture reading, a devotion, songs of praise, then to divide into teams and head out to villages beyond the two tracks. According to officials, medical workers rarely came to this boy's village and the ones beyond.
The boy probably couldn't understand the mixture of Honduran, Guatemalan, Nicaraguan, American, and Canadian languages spoken by our blended medical team sent to help him and others.
But he watched and appeared to listen.
Early each morning, the teams sat on benches arranged in a rectangle on a veranda made of broken cement. My chair leaned against the building giving me the view of a mountain to my right, the hospital center, and the hill where this boy sat.
Our leaders took turns giving the devotions, patiently waiting for their words to be translated into the three needed languages by two teen translators. The Nicaraguan leader spoke one day, another translated his words into Honduran, and the teens translated Honduran to English. Even prayers were translated three times so that everyone in the group could understand.
Each morning the boy came.
Each morning he moved farther down the hill, closer to our group until the last day when he sat at the edge of the broken cement.
He ran his hands through the grass and plucked a few blades.
We sang praises to God. That morning each member prayed in his/her own language. We listened to the day's instructions: break into teams, go to a designated village tucked in the mountains far away from...anywhere, open a day clinic, and be a witness to the the people.
After the instructions, an American leader closed the meeting.
What intrigued the boy to move from the top of the hill toward our group? I'm not sure. We didn't have games, movies, toys, gifts, or food. What drove him to sit only a foot away from the group the last morning and listen to the worship meeting? Well, at least the Honduran portion. I don't know.
I opened my eyes after the closing prayer and didn't see the boy.
I can't help but wonder how much he heard. What he understood. What he told his friends or family about the people who stayed at the abandoned Wycliffe Compound for ten days.
Who knows. Maybe I'll see him in heaven.
This post has been brought to you by the one-word: EarsThatHeard
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