by Brent Billings Youth Team Member

Shared By Brent Billings – Age 18 on Sunday 8/24/2008 at Berea UMC

Good morning. How is everyone doing this morning? Good?? We’re sitting in our nice cozy pews, in our fancy dress up cloths, in our cool air conditioned church. We even have windows and doors. What about that. It’s nice to be rich… “Rich?! I’m not rich!” Is probably what most of you are thinking right now. Well let’s define rich shall we?

We wake up every morning from our soft warm beds, take a long hot shower, and pick out what we will wear for that particular day from our wide variety of cloths in our closet, fixing ourselves a tasty breakfast, then get in our cars and leave for work or school. That’s not what rich is… That’s middle class…… Well if that is our definition of middle class, then what do we view as rich??

Is Rich waking up in a mansion, having servants pick out your cloths for you. The chef has your breakfast waiting for you on the table and it’s still warm. You get in the limo and your driver takes you where u want to go that day. Is this what we see as middle class and rich??

Now before you decide, take a second and imagine this lifestyle. Put yourself in these shoes…

Waking up on the dirt floor of your one room house with your family of 8, it’s hot because there are no windows or doors to keep out the hot sticky summer air. You are hungry because you didn’t have dinner last night so your kids wouldn’t go hungry. You are curious to see what’s for breakfast….or if there will be breakfast. No need to worry about what to wear because of the two changes of clothes that you have (one which you are wearing now) and the other being your church outfit which you only wear to services. There is also no worry for a shower because it hasn’t rained in the past week so no water. And even if there was, it would be cold, dirty rain water that gets caught in a big rain barrel out back. You can leave the kids asleep on the dirt floor. Don’t worry about getting them off to school because you don’t have the money to send them. They will wake up whenever they want and run around in the streets with the other kids during the day.

Now what would our society classify that lifestyle as?? Poor?? You see its funny because our society defines them poor and us as middle class, where as their society classifies their lifestyle as middle class and ours as filthy rich.

Ok let me make a transition and ask you another question.

Are we happy?? Shouldn’t we be happy?? I want you to raise your hand if you have been upset or unhappy since you woke up this morning. What about the last 24 hours. Ok now I want you to think about that time or a time recently when you were unhappy about something. Any why. Why were you unhappy? It couldn’t have been that big of a deal right. I mean look at everything we have to be happy about. Why are we unhappy??

While in Honduras our team met and saw A LOT of people. And you can ask anyone who was on that trip with us how many unhappy people we witnessed. There wasn’t a single one I can remember.

Let’s think about this for a second shall we??

As a whole, people in our society today are unhappy and complain about too many of things. If the people in Honduras saw us right now they would ask “They are rich. They have everything. What are they complaining about? They shouldn’t be worrying about anything.” But yet we still take everything we have for granted.

So with all this new insight, lets define rich again…..

Our first definition was – A nice house, nice cloths, a lot of money.
I think our new and real definition should be “rich – love, happiness, and Jesus Christ in your heart.”

And that’s what Honduras has. Loving, happy, Christ filled people.

This VIM team went to Honduras to help a poor broken nation. But instead what we got in return was help in our own lives from the richest people I have ever met. We did a lot of hard work down there but I honestly believe they helped us and touched us more than we even began to help them. Its funny to see how God works in his mysterious ways. He used what we thought were the poor, needy, and helpless (which are truly the most helpful, rich and bountiful) to help the real poor and needy……..US.