Almost Ready

The bags are packed. I’m ready to go…
At least almost.
First dinner.
Then a quiet evening.
Then, in the week hours of the morning I will gather with my fellow travelers.
We will check to make sure everyone has their passports and their $10.00 entrance fee to get into Nicaragua. Then we will head to the airport. By this time tomorrow I will have gone from minus zero wind chills to 80 degrees and sunny. But more than that I will have gone from one of the most affluent areas of the United States to the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. A country in which the United States has often been politically involved in ways which may have been beneficial to us, but not so much so to the people of Nicaragua.

We go to help.
Yes.
In the next week we will help to construct homes for six families.
These new homes will change their lives.
For the families with whom we work it will be the first time they live in a home with a real floor and with a roof that does not leak and with walls around them that will not collapse in an earthquake. But, in addition to that, I hope this trip changes our lives as well. I hope our eyes are opened up a bit. I hope we see more clearly what the world is like for so many people. I hope we open our hearts to the hospitality we will be shown and the gratitude that will wash over us. I hope. And, I hope we come close to that which we know and name as God who, if we believe the witness of Hebrew and Christian scriptures, is to be found more towards the edges than near the center.
I hope.