How many times have we heard, ‘it takes a village”? Perhaps never is it more evident than on the first day a clinic comes to life on a Faith in Practice trip! Buses full of our medical team arrived to the school grounds today in Jutiapa. Equipment and supply trucks followed. In just a few hours classrooms were transformed into patient rooms and a network of care emerged.
But that’s just a part of the adage, “it takes a village”. You see long before we packed our bags and boarded planes, Guatemalan volunteers had been canvassing this beautiful country for months assessing the many medical needs. They will find the boy who perhaps because of Cerebral Palsy can’t walk and must be carried. They will be the ones who give the invitation to come to the clinic to have a wheelchair built for him! And they won’t stop until they have found and invited 100’s of men, women and children whose lives will be changed because of the medical care needed and given this week. Oh how “it takes a village” expands our view! That beautiful sense of “village” broadens even more when we remember the Faith in Practice staff, whose tireless work pulls all the pieces together!
Matthew 22:37-39 tells us- “to love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” In a version called The Message, I love the next verse, verse 40. “These two commands are pegs; everything in God’s Law and the Prophets hangs from them.” May the nails we pounded today to hang up clinic signs, become “pegs” where villagers become neighbors, and the love of God binds us together and transforms us all!
Julie Eberly
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