Living to Love and Learn

One day in 1999, I was sitting in church when the pastor reached out to the congregation, saying, "Anyone who really wants to be a vessel for the Lord, step forward!" I wanted that more than anything. For many years, I had been doing what so many people do. I enjoyed regularly attending church and tried to help a few people here and there. But I felt a longing in my heart to be of service to an even greater extent. So, I went forward, along with several other people in the congregation. We stood together as the pastor and the prayer leaders prayed for us to become vessels for the Lord. That was it! My life was changed forever. The Lord knew my heart was pure. As I was writing this book in 2014, immigrant children from Guatemala and Honduras were arriving at our borders by the tens of thousands. In many cases, these children were arriving alone, sent to the United States by parents desperate for a better life for their children. It is easy to think of this as an immigration issue but it is actually a humanitarian crisis. Earlier in the book, I talked about how the guerillas grabbed kids off the street and trained them to become guerillas. Then, when they decided they didn't need them anymore, the guerillas put the kids back on the street and left them to fend for themselves. Along came the gangs, who were going into poor neighborhoods, looking for people who were in need of something and offering them food and drugs to dull their pain. They say, "You have nothing. Come be part of our gang." The gangs take them in and suddenly, they are no longer street children—they are members of the gang. Because the gang is giving them food and drugs, the kids are grateful to them. A similar situation still exists in certain Latin American countries today, where the people are grateful to the drug lords because the drug lords are the only ones improving their quality of life. Many of these countries actually have designated landing strips where drug traffickers land to deliver the drugs! Everybody knows about this—the U.S. government, the local people, the poor people. The drug traffickers simply pay off whoever they need to pay. With all that money changing hands, the poor hungry people aren't as hungry as they once were, and they think of these drug traffickers as gods. They say, "No! Don't do anything to these people! They are the only ones helping us."