Growing
By Lisa Steele, FLM Executive Director
Growing. I love this time of year where we have planted seeds and are seeing them sprout with beautiful flowers, fruits, and vegetables. Every year my family plants tomato plants that we diligently water during the hot and humid days we have in Middle Tennessee. The fruit of my labor is beginning to show this year with many flowers appearing and then tiny, green tomatoes. Over the next several weeks I will continue to grow, water, and weed my tomato garden until we can enjoy delicious, juicy fruit! This process takes time and no matter how well I plant the seeds or water the plants, I cannot make them grow any faster! As we grow in our daily lives, we see the same thing. Paul tells us in I Corinthians 3:6 “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth.”
At Family Life Missions we are planting and watering seeds so that God can grow in the lives of vulnerable children and families in Catacamas. It is exciting to see how God is growing and moving in Honduras through our ministry. In the past, we have focused our growth on our Por Los Niños Residential Homes and our Holistic Care Center that serves children who have experienced the trauma of abandonment and/or abuse. Along with this mission, we have seen God provide other opportunities for us to grow through our PLN Bilingual School, Family Preservation, and Foster Care. By strengthening families, we are providing a foundation for growth. This growth empowers families to thrive in their country with safe and affordable housing, education, and tools for bettering their lives through our family workshops and resources.
The Covid-19 Pandemic, although it sounds paradoxical, has also been an opportunity to make strategic changes. We must think that every crisis has a solution, an expiration date, a life changing experience. At Por Los Niños Bilingual school we have learned to be a lot more organized, punctual, tolerant, and even miss the noisy school environment. We had to make immediate changes and adjustments, urgent alternatives for educational continuity, and seek for the best options as an educational institution, which led to challenges and essential changes to continue giving education to our students.
In Psalm 68, we read that God is “a father to the fatherless, a defender of widows, is God in his holy dwelling. God sets the lonely in families.” At Family Life Missions, we have taken this Word as our mission: “To partner with God to set the lonely in families.” We began Family Life Missions 29 years ago providing residential homes for abandoned, orphaned, or vulnerable children through our Por Los Ninos Program. Unlike many organizations worldwide, we adopted a family setting as opposed to an institutional orphanage. We believed this was a better way. And it was.
As this new year progresses, we continue to grow with God, and we are convinced that God's vision is in the heart of the Por Los Niños school, of reaching generations that honor God and are competently transformed to serve the community, and to generate a transformation in their family and community. This fills me with great joy to know this!