Things as they are

Mommy and Joshie are back from a wonderful visit across the country with Linn Dappen, a dear sister in the Lord. She is currently spending time with her 87 year old mother, also a dear sister in the Lord! Catching up on our families was great. Also catching up on the needs in Mexico.

In the town where Linn's family lived for over 15 years (I forget how long), there are at least a half dozen drug related MURDERS each month. At least! There are no families in that town who are unaffected, ALL have lost multiple family members.

In the hills around town, there are children living up in the mountains, where drugs are grown for sale, without parents. What good are children up there? They cultivate the plants, of course. Without parents (or often even with parents) the children learn to run in gangs and often follow in the same paths of sin as their parents. With the entrance of the television in this town, sin has increased dramatically, fueling the fire...

In southern Mexico, families are the same. They need the light of the gospel. So many parents effectively abandon their children to the streets. These parents, if present at all, shuffle children out of the home at increasingly earlier ages, leaving them vulnerable to all manner of dangers. Not too different from life here or anywhere else. They are symptoms of real problem: sin

There are places in southern Mexico right now where a missionary family could just move in and start caring for orphans...feeding them and teaching them in the name of the Lord.

Some new friends of the Dappens, also doing work with orphans in southern Mexico. They fetch and care for the children of imprisoned criminals. They recently posted this on their blog, and it seemed worth passing on here:

What makes us missionaries is that along with our good works we take the good news message of the gospel to a lost and dying world. What good is a prolonged life of good health and comfortable surroundings if a person’s ultimate destiny is to live forever separated from the only true and living God in a place of terrible torment? Answer: there is nothing good about that scenario; we would only be making it more comfortable for the lost while on their way to hell.

Here is a post from the same blog, but its about what the Dappen's are doing, more recently.

The title of this post comes from a book written by the missionary, Amy Carmichael, also called to work with orphans. In her book, Things as They Are, she revealed the revolting, heartbreaking conditions of many poor children in India. Here is an excerpt that is really convicting to us as christians, and also as homeschooling parents:

Are these things truth or are they imagination ? If they are imagination — then let the paper on which they are written be burnt, burnt till it curls up and the words fall into dust. But if they are true — then what are we going to do? Not what are we going to say or sing, or even feel or pray — but what are we going to do?