Settling down and then leaving again

Hey all! I hope that all is going well back home and that everyone had a beautiful All Saints and All Souls day. It has been a while since I have been able to update this, we have had a lot of things going on and just when I think I have time to sit down and write, something comes up....so Im praying that I can actually finish this today.

First of all, thank you all for your prayers in this time, we have definitely needed it, for many of the situations God has placed within our community have been literally impossible, but His Grace alone has provided in the times that have seemed most difficult. Please continue to pray for the family of Maria Luisa and Johanna, the family we got out of their house due to irresponsibility of their mother who left them at home for days with their little sister. We got them to what seemed to be the perfect place for them, but when we came back to visit them a few days later to bring them their things, found that it was a somewhat anti-catholic evangelical orphanage....and for these girls (due to the death of their newborn baby brother this year, murder of their father, and negligence of their 24 yr old mother) the Church, Eucharist, and the embrace of our Mother Mary, were the ONLY solid consistent things they had in their life.....so it was a wreck to have left them for a period of time in a place where all of these things were not only attacked, but considered to be from the devil....
So with much prayer and meeting with the Friars, we were able to move them to a Catholic orphanage where the priest in charge is going to continue their classes in the faith and prepare Maria Luisa for her First Communion which was the one thing she told me on the way to the first orphanage, that she wanted most at this moment in time.....Please pray for her, for her faith, and for clarity in what is going on....she has lost so many things and people in this one year....she needs a miracle....and we need to believe that God will perform a miracle in her life.

Much of the past 3 or 4 weeeks have been consumed in these events and planning trips in order to secure the safety of these girls as well as other crisis, but with these crisis comes so much Grace not only in our lives here at the house but in my faith...although at times I enter the chapel for Holy Hour thinking and asking God, why these things happen.....the amount of faith that flows through the brokenness of these people has helped me grow and discover my part more and more in the Body of Christ, in ways Ive never known before...

Yesterday I was blessed abundantly to visit with a family of one of the young girls in our group Dulce, and I had the oppurtunity to spend a good hour and a half with her great grandmother who is about 75-80 years old. She lives not only in the poorest part of our neighborhood, but I would venture to say one of the poorest parts of the city of Comayagua...she grew up in a mountain village where the priest visited for Mass about once a year and she survived off of the land alone. Some family members recognized the gifts she had so they sent her to live in the City of Comayagua with an order of Franciscans here and work with the Bishop. So she started to grow in her faith and then realized....life means nothing without Christ and even deeper, in recieving His body and blood in the Eucharist...participating in something that unites all Catholic believers in the world, in all the years past and all the years to come as ONE BODY IN CHRIST...and she thought to herself, "none of my family is baptized or has recieved their first communion"
So she invited a ton of people from the mountains back in the 1950s to visit the Bishop and he baptized over 50 people in one day...and assigned a priest to her village in order to teach and form the people of the faith...Obviously, she has much family, she is the great grandmother of Dulce who is about 14 years old, and she is consecrated 3rd ORDER FRANCISCAN! She has been very sick for years now, and the friars and family have thought she was dying about 4 or 5 times now, and she is anxiously awaiting her arrival in heaven, but God is keeping her here for a time....and Praise Him for that! She passes her days for hours in her bed, sitting up praying spontaneously, recited the rosary for hours, and singing canticles to our Lord and interceding for the Missioners here, the friars and all the Church around the world.....she is truly a saint, and I cant describe what an honor it is to know her and to be loved by such a follower of Christ as her....amongst all of the brokenness and perversion I run into daily here in our neighborhood, it is the women like her that teach me how much Love their is in this world.

Please keep Maynor, Wilmer and I in your prayers, for we leave this coming week for a month...we are going up into the mountains on the boarder of El Salvador and Honduras to live and work with the people of El Florida...some of whom have never heard and experienced the word and love of Christ...pray for our faith and that God might use us as vessels of His Love.....I will be arriving back here on about the 13 of December and will be anxiously awaiting the arrival in late december of the team coming from Virginia! Peace to all of you! I love you and Miss you...

Peace of Christ

Andrew