Vision Month: Go Love

Okay, so the the secret's out.

Secrets out.

Fourth word is go.

And we're going to Guatemala, I guess.

So there you go.

Specifically, we are partnering with an amazing organization called Hope Chest, uh, that you guys saw just a few moments ago on the screen.

And we are forming a long-term partnership with a specific community in Guatemala.

Uh, it's called Centro, everybody say centro.

Dei Alcance Pueblito.

You guys all speak Spanish.

How cool is that?

Like you're so prepared.

We'll call we'll call them Centro Pueblito for short, but but Centro Pueblito, who you're gonna learn about today, they're they're now part of our family.

And we get to support them, we get to come alongside their vision for their community, their dreams.

Uh, and look, here's the reality: we are all brothers and sisters, right?

We all it's so cool when you think about it.

You know, if you believe in in Jesus, the Bible says that God has adopted you as his very own son or daughter.

So you have a father in God.

It also says that we are co-heirs with Christ, which basically means that Jesus is like our big brother, okay?

And so we're all brothers and sisters in the family of God, and these people, they're our family, and we get to know them, we get to meet them, we're gonna get to come alongside them for a long time.

What I want to do before we get into the specifics of who they are and what they do and how we can come alongside and what they need from us and all that kind of stuff, I want to start by telling you guys a story of how all this happened.

Because I want you to understand first and foremost that this is not a good idea, this is a God idea.

There's a big difference between a good idea and a God idea, I know because I've had a lot of good ideas, and I pursued those instead of stopping and listening to hear a God idea.

And and good ideas don't hold a candle to God ideas.

I've learned that the hard way.

I want you to know that God Himself has orchestrated this moment.

It's been literally a decade in the making.

And I uh yeah, it really has.

And I want to tell you guys some of that story, but to help me out with that, I want to invite someone on stage.

Nate, would you come up on stage, guys?

This is Nate Conley, he's here from Colorado from Hope Chest.

So could you guys give Nate a round of applause?

You might think of him as a thinner, more fit version of myself.

I'm okay with that if you want to do that.

It's not it's all good.

You wanna why don't we start with this?

Nate, tell us, you know, I know we saw the video, but tell us a little bit about Hope Chest, what you guys do, and really what makes your your vision unique and different.

Sure.

So Children's Hope Chest is an organization that that focuses on a model that we call community to community.

And so Justin later is going to talk about sponsorship and the importance of sponsorship and how you will have the opportunity today to sponsor a child.

But I don't want you to think about HobChest as a sponsorship organization because it's so much deeper than that.

It's just that we start with sponsorship.

So what makes us unique is that we partner a community in the in America, you guys, with a community overseas, Alkanse, and then the two of you are going to engage in a relationship.

Now, a lot of times in the United States, when we think about missions, we think about we, the North American Church, going and doing something to other people.

We have great intentions, but what we what we are focused on at Hope Chest and what we are focused on in this relationship is you guys going and being with another community that is very wealthy in ways that we are not.

We have resources where we can help transform communities.

They have resources, and they can help transform communities.

And so the two of you are gonna come together and form this relationship that's gonna be amazing.

And people in Guatemala, their lives are gonna be transformed, and people here, your lives are going to be transformed.

It's all about two communities engaging in one relationship focused on the kingdom.

One of the things that uh when we first started talking really got me excited about Hope Chest is that what they do essentially is they find local leaders in these communities who are already doing what God's called them to do.

So if a leader in Guatemala, for say, and you guys are all over the world, but if a leader in Guatemala came and said, hey, I have this idea, there's this ministry I want to start, it's gonna help these children, I just need, I need a sponsor, I need, you know, an American sponsor to give me the funding to get it off the ground, you would say, you know, no.

They take leaders who are already doing the work.

People have said, God has told me to do this, I will do it no matter what.

I will do it even without the resources, I'll find a way.

And then they bring churches in America alongside those people.

Because really, at the end of the day, it's it's it's the people in the community who are gonna change their community, right?

I mean, we could all go on a mission trip together, all of us at once.

It would be a very exciting adventure.

Um but even all of us together, and everyone who's gonna be here at the second gathering, us going somewhere for five days is not going to really move the needle much.

But people in those communities, the people that God has put there, the people that He has given vision to, the people that He has called that live there, that that's their home.

Those are their people.

They are the ones that change those communities, and we get to come alongside them.

It is a relationship.

And so this is not just just some cause that we're gonna go and dabble in.

This is actually a real relationship where we're gonna get to know some people, and they're gonna get to know us, and we're gonna help them.

You know what?

They're gonna help us.

They're gonna help change our perspective, they're gonna help us grow.

It's a really exciting thing.

And so we're gonna go into more detail about what that looks like, um, but I do want to get to this.

There's a lot of there's a lot of just so happens moments in how this has all come about.

You know, and I don't know if you believe in coincidence or not, but I definitely believe that when you have a long string of it just so happens moments, it's pretty clear indication that God's involved.

In fact, there's a verse in Proverbs, Proverbs 16.9, that says, we make our plans, right?

But it's the Lord who determines our steps.

And so sometimes in life we have ideas, we're going places, and then God all of a sudden goes, Yeah, actually, this is gonna happen.

And and there are some some pretty big just so happens moments that we get to talk about.

And Nate, I want to start with you, because it just so happens that this is not your first Sunday here, right?

So tell that tell that story.

So I lived not too far away from here about nine, seven, eight long time ago.

That way.

And we had friends um who we met when we moved here who happened to go to this church.

And so my wife and I were recently married, and then we started attending this church nearly, I don't know, yeah, like eight, eight, nine years ago.

Right.

So not my first time.

So uh so you and I actually met one time while you guys were here.

We did.

Do you remember like the I I remember, yeah.

It was a game.

How could you forget, right?

How could you forget?

So yeah, it was magical.

Yeah, so so okay, it's a game night.

So tell that story, like you from your perspective.

Yeah, so our friends who invited us to come to his hands were trying to get us plugged into the community, but we were also getting ready to move.

Um so we were only here about six months.

And so they said, hey, listen, we know you're about to move, but you need to come meet some really cool people.

Um Justin's not one of those people, but there's some other people who are gonna be there that are really cool.

So, do you want to come and hang out with us even though you're getting ready to move?

And we said, Yes, let's let's let's do this.

So, this this couple, John and Caitlin, was their name.

They invited Megan and I to their house for a game night, and we go there, and here's this couple, Nate and Becky, and they're like, hey, Nate and Becky go to his hands.

We're like, Oh, nice to meet you guys.

Never never met them before.

We played cranium.

Anyone ever play cranium?

Yeah, there you go.

Okay.

So we we won.

We the boys won.

It was boys versus girls, and you know, not that we remember that we won, but I remember that we won, and I remember that we made a huge come from behind victory.

We didn't.

And the girls were flabbergasted, their jaws dropped, they're still bitter.

So we hang out for this one night, and it was one of those cool moments where it was like, man, you guys seem great.

If you guys were still gonna be here, you know, we would probably hang out, we would probably be good friends, but you know, we literally met that one night, and it was like, nice to meet you.

Have a good life, because they were moving away like the next week.

Okay?

So we met.

It just so happens that you know that we met here at his hands about 10 years ago, right before Nate left.

We had this very small window of opportunity.

We just so happened to be friends with the same person here at his hands that knew us independently, and they just so happened to invite us over to the same game night.

But that's not actually the first time we met.

We just didn't know that.

And so, do you want to talk about that for a second?

Because this is this is where it gets cool, right?

This is where God starts showing off.

All right?

Okay, so the the goosebumps moment, I guess, for me.

Um, we hung out, won in cranium, defeated the girls.

Just want to make sure we know that.

Very random with this guy who is actually pretty cool, named Justin.

And then it's over, right?

It's done.

And then, you know, I I jump on Facebook.

I'm like, hey, you know, I'm gonna look him up and then connect, see what happens.

And I type in his name, and then this kind of like light bulb goes off in my head.

I'm like, oh my goodness.

This is Justin McTear.

Springfield, Missouri, where we went to middle school together and used to spend each other spend the night at each other's houses.

Yeah, yeah, for real.

No joke.

So I get so so to give you some background, I was born in Springfield and I lived there until I was in the seventh grade, and uh and then I moved.

I moved in the middle of seventh grade to Wisconsin, and then I went to three schools in eighth grade, and then I went to three schools in my tenth grade year, and I just moved around a ton.

And so when you're someone like me, and maybe you grew up and you moved around a lot, you have literally thousands of people that you went to school with.

And it's actually really hard as an adult, you know, if someone just said, hey, so and so, you're like, uh, but you almost need to like have it categorized for you.

And then your brain goes, Oh yeah, oh my gosh.

And so I had not seen Nate since the middle of seventh grade.

I get this Facebook message and I recognize the picture from the guy, oh, the guy that I played, you know, cranium with, and we totally came back from behind and beat the girls.

I remember you.

And uh, and he says, Hey, random, is this the Justin McTear that went to Pleasant View Middle School in Springfield, Missouri in like 1995, 96?

And all of a sudden, seeing his name in full next to his picture, because we don't look the exact same as we did in seventh grade, believe it or not.

Um, it like, oh my gosh, Nate Connolly, like I spent the night at your house.

We did church stuff together.

Like, we lit we were we were like friends to the point where if I had not moved, we probably would have been extremely close friends as we grew up.

I just hadn't seen him since seventh grade, and it just so happens that all of my moving around, which led me here, and all the things that God did in his life, which led him here to his hands, and us meeting the same group of people independently from one another and being invited over on the same game night the week before he moves to wherever he you went to Missouri and then to Colorado and or California, I don't know, you went to a lot of places.

It just so happens that we connected.

And it just so happens that we like spent the night at each other's house when we were kids.

And so I remember thinking in that moment, well, this is probably a God thing, you know?

This seems odd.

But there was really nothing, like there was nothing to do.

It was like, okay, man, well, cool.

You know, that's neat.

I have a good life.

And then, and you have again so that's right, the second time.

Well, there you go.

So, several years later, fast forward to like two, three years ago, I was reading a book.

I just transitioned into the lead role here.

And missions has been something that has been on our minds.

It's something, look, when Jesus says go, we're like, all right, let's do that.

But there's some big decisions to make.

Are we ready?

Do we have the right people in place?

Is our culture right for that?

You know, we kind of have to think about our culture like cement.

Things have to solidify before we can put the weight on top of it.

And we want to make sure that we're in the right place.

But I was really feeling at the time, like, missions needs to happen soon.

And I was reading this book, and in this book, I talked about a young man who was really smart and promising and left a really successful career just to pursue working with impoverished people.

And for some reason, reading that book, I just went, Nate Conley.

And don't be offended, I hadn't thought about you in years.

Um but, and I doubt you've been thinking about me.

But literally, I was like, Nate Conley, that reminds me of his story.

I wonder what he's up to.

I wonder if he's still doing missions work.

I hadn't connected, we haven't even talked on Facebook really since that moment.

And so I reached out to Nate on Facebook and he gave me his number, and I called him, I said, Hey man, are you still doing missions stuff?

He's like, I am.

I'm in Colorado now with this group called Hope Chest.

I was like, that's awesome.

Well, hey, at some point in time, you know, someday, uh, I'd love to talk to you because I think we're gonna be ready to start moving in that direction pretty soon.

And then Nate said, Well, it just so happens that I'm gonna be in Atlanta in two days.

Do you want to like meet up?

And I'm like, okay, like, what in the world?

You know?

And so so God has done all this crazy stuff, bring it full circle, you know, to bring you here, to bring me here, to connect us, and we just so happen to go, and by the way, Pleasant View Middle School in Springfield, Missouri, not a big place.

Okay?

It's not like metropolitan, so it's pretty small, and all this stuff has worked together to bring us to this moment.

What I'm trying to say is God has orchestrated this, and it's pretty clear.

And so we're gonna get to work with Nate.

Nate, do you have anything else you want to say before we we throw you off the stage?

I don't know what else I can say to make this story even bigger.

I guess we could just say amazing.

Yeah.

It's been awesome, have a nice life.

I'll see you some, you know.

You know, that would be that would be fitting.

I'd I'd invite you to spend the night at my house, but I just think it'd be weird tonight, you know?

Oh, it's good.

Dude, thank you so much.

Thank you guys.

Guys, let's hear it for Nate.

It's just, it's crazy how God works.

I mean, like, be honest, what are the odds of that, right?

And so that that's what led us to talk to Hope Chest.

Was all this stuff that God had orchestrated connecting me and Nate again.

We both went to school together.

And I met with Nate and some people from Hope Chest when they came to Atlanta two, three years ago, and we began to talk and they began to share their vision, and we really fell in love with what they do.

We really did.

It just lined up so much with what with what we're about as a church, because it's not about religion, it's about relationship with them.

And so we knew that this was something we wanted to do, but there were a lot of questions.

Like, for example, where are we gonna go?

Because Hope Chest is in Russia and Uganda and Ethiopia, uh, they're in Guatemala, they're all over the world.

And so there's a lot of different options, and we're like, okay, if we're gonna work with them, we gotta we gotta make some decisions.

And God started to bring people to my mind that I needed to talk to to get involved.

One of those people is Tessa Boast, who is awesome.

Tessa is someone, if you don't know her, she's been part of our church since she was in middle school, and if God tells her to go, she goes.

And so I'm like, Tessa needs to be involved.

And I reached out to Tessa, and Tessa came in and she started talking with Hope Chest, and we started to pray about where we're where are we gonna go.

And I asked Tessa specifically, I said, Well, you pray and really ask God to give you clarity on where we're supposed to go, because I really felt like it needed to be Tessa that made that decision, and then I would come alongside and we'd pray together.

And she did, and she said, I think we're supposed to go to Guatemala.

And I was actually really surprised because Tessa had spent a year in Africa recently, and and I figured that since Hope Chess was in Africa and Tessa had been in Africa for a year, that that's probably something we would do because it just seemed like, oh, that makes sense, right?

That God sent Tessa to Africa and she could really help us, you know, get ready for that.

But she said, I don't know why, but Guatemala, that's that's where I'm thinking.

And I go, okay, well, that's awesome.

That's not where I had in mind, but I did really hear from God that you needed to be involved in this decision.

So let's just keep praying and and let's let's see about it because God will confirm it.

Like if it's a God thing, he'll confirm it.

And that's what's so exciting because he's done that.

So right after I talked to Tessa and she said Guatemala, it just so happens that there was a home group leader meeting uh that Sunday after church.

And so I stay after and we're working with the home group leaders, and it just so happens that a woman named Dawn was at our home group leader meeting.

I say it just so happens because she's not one of our home group leaders.

She snuck in.

Okay?

That's not how it worked.

She infiltrated.

No, no, what happened is she's she's in a home group, and the woman who who leads her home group couldn't make the meeting, and so that woman asked Dawn, who helps her out, if she would be there to help her get filled in.

And so Dawn came to that meeting, and and I knew Dawn because for about six months prior to that meeting, Dawn had hounded me on Sunday mornings saying, Hey, are we doing missions?

What are we gonna do?

Missions are we gonna do missions?

We need to do missions.

I like to do missions, I want to do missions, I'm called to missions.

And so it just so happens that Dawn's there, and I just talked with Tessa and we're like Guatemala.

So after the meeting was done, a few people are lingering in the room.

I said, Hey, Dawn, let's talk.

And Dawn came over and we're kind of having one of those whisper conversations that you have to the side, you know, where you look real suspicious to other people.

We're doing that.

And so I'm like, hey, Dawn, um, so it looks like you know, we're moving forward with the missions thing.

Definitely want you involved, and it's your heart.

Um, Guatemala is where we're thinking about going right now, but it could change, you know.

I was being real non-committal, like, we don't know, we're still waiting on God to confirm that, but it looks like Guatemala.

And Dawn's eyes lit up.

And she said, Wow, well, it just so happens that I'm teaching in English as a second language class right now, and all the men who attend my class are from Guatemala.

And I was like, You don't say, but it gets better.

All of a sudden, as we're having this obviously private conversation, we're whispering, a man named Eric Brol pops in.

Okay.

Eric is awesome.

He and his wife, Jen, lead a home group here, that's why they were in the room.

But they were on the other side of the room, and here we're whispering, and Eric just goes, Hey, sorry to interrupt you guys.

I can tell you're having a private conversation, but I think I heard you say Guatemala.

And I said, Yeah, and I'm trying to, again, I'm a big believer in not announcing something until you can really answer questions.

So I like to keep things, you know, in a in a pretty small cone of silence.

And I said, Oh, okay, yeah, all right.

So here's another person.

Um, yes, we are in the initial stages of planning, starting some missions work for the very first time, and it looks like Guatemala is where we're gonna go, but we're not, we don't know yet.

We're still waiting on God to confirm it.

I'm still sort of reacting to what Don has just said, and Eric says, Man, that's crazy.

Because it just so happens that my wife Jen is from Guatemala and grew up there.

And I'm like, you don't say.

Now I've known Jen for a while, and I knew Jen did not grow up in the United States.

I knew she she was born somewhere else and whatnot, but I didn't know where.

And so he brings Jen over, and now the you know four of us are having this conversation, and they start talking about how they they've been really blessed and and they want to they want to give back, and they felt for years like they wanted to give back to Guatemala, but they didn't know how or through what channel, and they wanted to be involved.

And I said, Well, guys, I don't know if you're supposed to be involved.

Let me pray about it.

No, I'm like, clearly, yes.

You know, there is a time to act, and that was the time, and I said, You guys, yes.

And God just confirmed over and over again that He had started this process by connecting Nate and myself together, and and he had confirmed that Guatemala was the place.

In fact, three weeks ago, we showed our first little teaser video.

If you've been here all month long, we've been showing these little 30-second videos that have footage of obviously a foreign country, and and then we've we've given no other context, no way that you would know.

Like who looked at the screens and said, That's Guatemala, you know?

A few of you.

Okay.

You don't say, you don't say that God has put more people here that are familiar with Guatemala.

Well, we show the video the very first Sunday, and in the hallway, this woman comes up to me and she says, Justin, justin, I need to talk to you.

And I said, Okay, what's going on?

She said, You showed video of Guatemala.

And I said, I did.

How do you know that?

Because it's pretty nondescript footage.

And she said, Well, it just so happens that uh my husband, Christian, and I have gone to church here for several years.

He is from Guatemala, grew up there, and we would really love to be involved.

And I said, Well, it just so happens that our missions team is meeting 10 feet from where we're standing right now, planning the launch of this.

Would you like to go to the meeting?

And she said, Yes, and they went, and now they're on our team.

I mean, God has just confirmed this left and right.

And so if you don't want to go to Guatemala, tough, because we're going to Guatemala, because God has made this so clear.

It's exciting.

Now, what Nate talked about is is what Hope Chess does.

They partner communities here with communities and people that are doing amazing work.

And I want to take a few moments and talk to you about our partner.

I'm so like, I'm so excited to talk about this.

So in October, a group of us went to Guatemala and we took what they call a vision trip, and our purpose there was to find our partner.

You know, it was kind of like e-harmony, but for ministry.

And so we're we're in Guatemala and and we're meeting all these amazing people, we're just being blown away, but we're praying specifically, God, you need to make it clear to us who we're supposed to work with.

And it was actually really tough because there were a lot of options, and they were all incredible, and we were all moved in different ways by by different groups, and it took us some time even after we left Guatemala to really process and pray, and and eventually God gave us unity as a team on who we needed to work with.

And it's it's Central Publito.

And so let me tell you what they do and why it's so important.

Guatemala is an amazing place in so many ways, and like every place in the world, it has challenges.

And the community that we're gonna be working with, Publito, has some pretty specific challenges that make it a very dangerous.

Dangerous place for children, a very dangerous place to live.

One of those challenges is education or kind of the lack thereof.

Education in Guatemala is not like it is here.

It's very rare in Publito for someone even to make it to high school.

If you're a high school student in Publito, you are one of the most educated people in your community.

And that's for a variety of different reasons.

Number one, it's poverty.

And even though the public education is free, any of us that have children in public school know that it's not really free, right?

I mean, there's school supplies and there's money needed for other things, and the families there are so poor that they cannot afford, oftentimes, just to pay for the school supplies to keep their kids in school.

The schools themselves are incredibly overcrowded.

There is one public school in Publito, it serves elementary all the way through high school, class sizes of 60 plus.

So if you fall behind, you're behind.

There is no such thing as a teacher giving you personal attention saying, let me work with you and get you caught up with the class.

If you fall behind, you're behind.

And so you combine that with the poverty dropout rates are astronomically high.

And in Guatemala, even more so than in the United States, if you don't have an education, you cannot advance out of poverty.

It is difficult for you to get a job waiting tables without an education in Guatemala.

And so these children, if they drop out, that is, in a sense, solidifying that they will live in poverty unless someone else in their family is able to go somewhere and make something of themselves.

So that's a big issue.

This major lack of education.

There's also a major lack of healthy parenting.

And that's for a variety of reasons.

Single parenthood is an epidemic in Guatemala.

In 2014, for example, in 2014, 25% of all children born in Guatemala were born to an adolescent mother.

25% of every birth, of all children.

There were over 5,000 pregnancies that year alone in girls younger than 14.

And four out of five of those were the result of rape.

The culture in Guatemala is such that you don't really have the birds and bees conversation with your children, you just don't do that.

And so the children, these girls, they're very innocent, and people can take advantage of that.

Because no one ever tells them, hey, this is how it is.

It's just culturally something that they don't do.

So the girls are very easily taken advantage of.

And the result is you have a lot of young girls with children.

And when you have young people raising young people, you oftentimes have young people raising themselves.

And even when it's a scenario where the mother, or even if there's two parents, even if they're doing their absolute best, and most of them are, they have to work.

And at best, most of them are day laborers, and so what happens is in the mornings they go into the city, they go into Guatemala City to try to find work, and they're gone from the morning until the night, and their children are sort of on their own.

Now, because the public schools are so overcrowded, you only go to school for like three hours a day.

The way it works is that elementary kids go early in the morning for three hours, like nine to noon, and then at noon they leave, and the middle school kids come in from like 12:30 to 3:30, and then they leave, and the high school kids come at night.

So if you're an elementary school child, yeah, you have a place to be that's somewhat safe, where you'll have some supervision from 9 to noon, but then after that, what?

Because you may not have a parent at home to take care of you, you may you may be on your own for the rest of the day and you're hungry and you're vulnerable.

If you're a high school student, you've got nowhere that you have to be until night, and that's just not a good recipe, especially with some other things in their community.

Number one, there's gangs, a gang activity.

Like Nate and I talked on the phone, he said, you could not, you could not overestimate the influence and the effect of gangs in this community.

Because what happens is when you have when you have children on the streets and they're hungry and they're vulnerable and their parents are not there and they're not educated, the gangs have easy targets to recruit.

Because they can come into these kids and they can offer them some food.

And they can offer them some things that they could never have on their own.

And when you're a young child and you're scared and you're hungry, it's really hard to say no to that kind of thing.

And so the gangs recruit the children on the streets because that's where the children are, because they're unsupervised, because they're not in school.

The kids are falling behind in school, they're dropping out of school, now they really don't have a purpose, and so the gangs get them involved and and they get them involved in crime and all kinds of horrible things.

Murder is a common occurrence.

The murder rate in Guatemala City is the third highest in the world, in any city in the world.

And that's where Centro comes in.

Because God has given them this vision and they are they are changing their community.

So what Centro does is pretty amazing.

They they really address like every problem that we just talked about.

So they have this thing, they say centro, that means center, they call them drop-in centers in Guatemala.

And the way it works is this in the morning, when the elementary school kids go to school, middle school kids come to Centro.

And they get fed so they're not hungry.

And they get poured into spiritually, they get taught who Jesus is, who they are in Jesus' eyes, they get tutored in their studies.

They have tutors that come alongside them and keep them from falling behind in their classes.

They keep them engaged with school so they don't quit, they don't give up.

They even have things like computer labs and like music classes, things that these kids don't ever have access to, so that learning for them is actually exciting and fun.

And so the kids stay engaged.

And then whenever it's time for them to go to school, they leave Centro well fed and taken care of, and they go to school.

So you know what?

They're not on the street all day long.

And when those elementary school kids who were in school get out of school, the middle school kids leaving Centro go to their school, and the elementary school kids come to Centro and they get fed and they get loved on and they get tutored and they get helped in their classes so they don't fall behind and they they have so much joy.

In fact, we spent uh the better part of a day at Centro with the elementary school kids.

We have some footage that we'll put up for you here, and I'm telling you, these kids, we're dancing around with them, we were having fun, and and these kids, despite the circumstances they live in, they have so much joy.

They are so full of life.

We got to sit down with them.

That's my dancing.

I'm trying to learn there's a language barrier, and I'm just going with it.

Um we got there, the children came and we fed them, and for many of those children, that may likely be the only meal that they had that day.

And, you know, in this one area, we danced with them, we had fun, they're celebrating, they're laughing, and then all of a sudden they broke tables out, and all the kids went from dancing to sitting.

I mean, honestly, way more well-behaved than American children.

They went from dancing to sitting because they're eager to learn, and these tutors are there, and these tutors are working with them.

And by the way, the tutors, you know who they are?

They're high school students.

Because again, if you're in high school, you're one of the most educated people in your community, and here's what's amazing about that: their high school tutors are not on the street all day before they go to school, vulnerable, susceptible.

The high school students are at centro giving back and tutoring, and then centro it's paying for their school costs in exchange for their tutoring.

So it's keeping these high school kids from dropping out.

It's like addressing all of these needs.

And they're starting to see things happen that have been unheard of in their community.

They're seeing children actually go to college.

And by the way, in their culture, if one of your family members can go to college and get a good job, that can transform your entire family.

Centro is changing their community.

The children are being fed, they're being watched and cared for.

And guys, what's what's happening because of that is that the children are starting to dream.

Like, children need to dream, right?

My son, Liam, my oldest, he's starting to talk to me now about what he's gonna do after the NBA.

Um, like he's dreaming about that.

He's like, you know, I'm not gonna be able to play basketball forever.

So after I'm done in the NBA, I'm thinking about this, you know, and in his dreams have advanced even beyond that.

And I try to tell him not to get ahead of himself, but then he dropped 23 points yesterday in a game.

So I mean, like, what do you do?

You know, what do you do?

So, but like children dream.

Our children, they dream.

Our children that are hanging out over in the junior high area, the elementary, they're dreaming right now about life.

But it's really hard to dream when you're hungry.

When all you can think about is, am I going to eat today?

It's really hard to dream about your future.

It's really hard to dream when you're scared and you have to look behind you every second of every day.

Because of the gang activity and the danger of where you live.

It's really hard to dream when you're when you're an eight-year-old taking care of three younger siblings all day long.

It's hard to dream about your future, but because of Centro, because now these parents don't have to worry where their children are or who's watching their children or who's around their children.

Their children can dream, and these parents can dream, and these parents are now having higher standards for their children, and they're proud of what their children are doing, so they're more engaged in their children's lives, and it's literally changing their community.

And we get to come alongside and help them.

That's an honor.

Now, in a second, I'm gonna talk about practical steps.

But I would be doing you a disservice if I didn't talk to you for just a moment about who we're gonna partner with in terms of people, because Centro is not just some organization, some faceless, nameless organization.

Centro is run by some amazing people that I got to meet, that you're gonna get a chance to meet.

I want to introduce you real quick to uh Lorena.

This is Lorena.

Lorena is awesome.

She runs the uh the center that we're gonna be working with directly.

Okay, so uh, if you ever take a trip, which you'll have the opportunity to, you will meet Lorena.

She is an incredible person.

She's a person with vision.

That's what I love about her.

In fact, at one point we asked her some questions about some of the dreams that she had and some of the plans that they have, and she could tell us to the color of the paint on the walls.

And when you dream that specifically, like that's gonna happen.

And I gotta spend a lot of time with this woman named Mimi, and I want to spend a little bit of time talking about Mimi, because Mimi is who actually started Central Altogether.

There's two locations now.

We're coming alongside their Publito location.

Their other location has a sponsor, which is awesome.

They have a church partner.

And so Mimi is about five feet tall, Nate.

Is that what you would say?

Maybe?

Spiritually, she is a giant.

This woman, what she has been through, what she has has done to see this through, it is it is unimaginable.

And just talking with her and listening to her tell her story, I was as humble as I have ever been in my life.

Like we have to understand how real the danger to these children is.

When we were when we were there in October, we met a young man named Miguel.

Miguel's 16 years old, has five younger siblings.

Miguel has kind of come along through through Centro, and all of his siblings are involved at the center as well.

Miguel was one of the high school tutors.

And so he's one of the high schoolers that's tutoring these children during the day, then going to school.

And Miguel shared with us what Centro has meant to him and to his siblings.

Two days after we left, Miguel was kidnapped and murdered by a gang.

And I remember getting that email, and you know, we hear that, and all of our hearts break.

That's that's not unfortunately an uncommon experience for Mimi.

Just a few in the last couple months, a brother and sister, young children at at Centro were shot as the result of gang violence in the streets, and the boy is expected to make it, but the little girl did not.

And this is something that Mimi has experienced time and time again.

I worked with youth and children for about 10 years, and there were some experiences I had where some kids that I worked with went through some really hard things, and it's really tough when you invest in children to see tragedy happen.

What she's experienced, I can't even fathom.

When we were there, she took us to the site of something that happened two years ago, just a little over two years ago.

Two miles from from her location, there was a mudslide one night.

And the poorest people in her community live in the bottom of this valley, and she took us to that location.

We're standing and we're looking down into the valley, and it's just these little shacks and shanties.

And two years ago, a chunk of mountain about the size of a 17-story building came off during a mudslide in the rainy season, and it just completely pummeled the community.

And over 200 people died that night, including 30 of her children.

And obviously, she was part of the rescue effort, and the local leaders, you know, gathered her and some other people, whole families died together, but they needed people to identify the bodies.

And because Mimi knew these children, because she worked with them, works with them every single day.

She is there feeding them, she is teaching them, she she's like risks her life for them.

To the point where like what Mimi does has angered the gangs so much because she is messing with their system and she's making it difficult for them to recruit.

They've had to move several times because they've been threatened.

Like she risks everything for these children, and she she had to be there and identify these bodies as they came out.

And she shared with us with these, you know, tears in her eyes, that she said she told God after that experience, I cannot do this anymore.

I can't, I just can't.

She said that every time she closed her eyes, she just saw those children's faces.

She said that sometimes those children, when they would leave Centro, they would beg her to take them home with her.

And that same day, she had three brothers that said, Please let us come home with you.

And she said, I cannot do that.

You have to go with your parents.

And those three boys all died that night.

And she said, God, I just can't, I cannot do this anymore.

But she said that God told her that he needed her there.

And she said, Okay.

That's what I'm trying to tell you is that Mimi's not going to quit.

One of the challenges we have in our country is that we have leaders who lack resolve, character, and resourcefulness.

And when you take someone who lacks resolve, character, and resourcefulness, and you hand them resources, they will waste them or they will abuse them.

But when you take someone who has resolve, who has character and who has resourcefulness, and you come alongside them and you give them resources, you watch what they do.

Our goal is not to need to sponsor and partner with this specific community for 20 years.

They have a vision and a plan to be self-sustaining.

Mimi's the one with the dream.

Mimi and Lorena, they're the ones with the vision.

They have a vision.

They're not saying we don't know what to do.

They know what to do.

They just need us to help them do it.

They have a development plan, things that they're going to be putting in place over the next several years so that they can be a self-sustaining group of people because that's what they want.

That's what their community needs.

They need to do it.

They need to step up.

They need to take pride in what they do.

Part of that development plan is financial, and we as a church will be contributing to that development plan.

So when you give here financially, we will be giving to them so that they can accomplish the things on their plan.

That's part of it.

We'll have the opportunity every year to take trips down there.

And you'll have the chance to meet Mimi.

You'll have an opportunity.

It's yours to take, and not all of us will go, and that's okay.

But you'll have the opportunity to actually go and know these people.

Like Nate said, this is not some distant group that we're going to send relief to.

This is family.

Like we all need to get really good at pronouncing Centro del Consejo Publito.

Like practice that.

I'll probably mispronounce it a lot, but it's okay.

Today, where we start is with child sponsorship.

And this is so cool.

When you leave today, we're going to wrap up with a song and worship team.

You guys can go ahead and come on out.

When you leave today, you will see in the main lobby a ton.

There's 218 children that we want to step up and sponsor.

These are the children at Centro that need sponsored.

They don't call them sponsors with the children, by the way.

They're called prayer friends.

Okay?

So what that looks like practically is this it's$38 a month.

Okay?

$38 a month is not nothing.

So I don't want us to make this decision emotionally or like, okay, I guess we have to do that, and we go do it, and then two months later, like, I don't know if I could.

But$38 is also not everything, right?

I have three children and another on the way.

When I go through Chick-fil-A's drive-thru, I spend$38.

Okay?

Can I do without Chick-fil-A one time a month?

Clearly, yes, I can.

Okay.

So it's$38 a month.

That sponsors a child.

That provides food, that provides their school supplies, it provides the relief that they need.

And it's really, you know, the center there is handling all of that, which is so great because they're there with the kids.

They know those needs, but you're meeting those child's needs.

You're allowing Centro to take care of those children.

What's one of the amazing things about Hope Chess is they actually have local staff.

So there's staff in Guatemala.

Carolina, who you saw in the video, there's a man named Nestor, a woman named Wendy, there's all these amazing people in Guatemala from Guatemala, and they actually go out to the care point all the time.

They're in relationships, so they're able to update us like often with what's going on.

What that means too is that when we write letters to the children that we sponsor, and you can actually even type those up through our website, and we'll put it on our mobile app as well.

It's really easy.

You can even just go online right now today if you sponsor a child.

You can go to hishandschurch.com, you'll find a link on our main page, and you can like type up a letter to your child.

They will translate it and take that to your child.

Because they have people there on the ground.

It's awesome.

But we start with sponsorship.

We start with meeting these children's immediate needs because if they're hungry, it's hard to feed the soul when the stomach is hungry.

That's something that Jesus did, by the way.

And so what you have an opportunity to do is to make that decision today.

This is going to be a family partner that we have for a long time, but it starts today with that decision.

And so in the lobby, you'll see these cards, they're hanging up on some panels.

You can grab a card and don't grab one if you're just thinking about it, okay?

Like you pulling that card off, you've made a decision.

Right?

You break it, you buy it.

No, I'm just joking.

Like, I'm just saying, like when you pull a card off, that's a commitment, okay?

So you can look, you can peruse, talk to, talk to, you know, if you're here with a spouse, talk to your spouse and really, really make sure that this is a decision you're you're good with making.

But be excited about it because man, we get a chance to make an impact.

And then you'll take that card to someone at the info desk or the connect desk and they will handle everything there with you.

It'll take care of it today.

Um, I just want to I want to say thank you in advance to those of you who are gonna do that.

I want to say thank you to all of you guys who are who are the church.

Like we're his hands.

And what an honor that we get to do this.

Am I right?

Like seriously?

What an honor that we get to do this.

And so there's 218 kids that we're gonna take care of.

That's how we get started.

There will be a lot to talk about in the weeks and months and years to come.

We exist to love people to Jesus.

And so we want people to, we want you guys, everybody, to get love.

We want you to grow love, we want you to give love, and it's time for us as a church to go love.

And so we're gonna do that starting today.

Uh before we pray and wrap up, Nate, is there anything else you want to say?

You're good?

You sure?

Okay.

And again, man, have a great life when you move, when you go back.

It's gonna be awesome.

I'm sure.

I did text Megan about you spending the night.

She said we she said no, she can't.

Sorry.

It's like my mom all over again, you know.

Um, let's pray together, guys.

Jesus, thank you so much.

Thank you so much for every opportunity you give us to come together.

Father God, we uh we want to recognize that you're not simply our father, but you are the father of everyone who has given their life to you.

And I spent time in Guatemala with these children, and I can say, Lord, that they love you.

And they they are full of life.

And Lord, they don't have some of the perks that we have, they don't have some of the advantages that we have.

But we want to let them know, Lord, that they do have people who care, they have people who love them, they have people, brothers and sisters, brothers and sisters in in you, Jesus, who will step up and support them.

And so, Lord, I pray right now that you would make it clear to those of us in the room who need to make this step, that we would not be afraid of a commitment, that we would not overthink it, but also that we would be decided in our hearts, that we would take this opportunity to serve our new family members in Guatemala, that you would give us a genuine love for them and that you would remind us, Lord, that if we're gonna be your hands, then we need to reach out and we need to reach beyond our community.

Thank you for this day, Lord.

Thank you for all you've done to make it happen.

We we pray all this in your name, Jesus.

Amen.