Hey Everyone,
Thank you as always for your continued faithfulness in praying, encouraging and giving to us at Destino del Reino.
There are a lot of things on my heart today that need much prayer. First of all, there are several students in our school who are living alone or in very bad environments and are afraid at night and very lonely. We are trying to work with the families involved but it is difficult. If we reported them to the government agency they could be taken away and lose their opportunity to be in Destino each day where they are loved and taught about the love of the Father for them. It is so hard on me not to be able to rescue these kids but it is a touchy situation. God knows the needs and He is able to guard them so please pray for the children at risk in their homes and that we will have the wisdom to help them outside of the classroom when necessary.
Another thing that I need prayer for is our seniors in the high school. This is our second graduating class and it seems to be a struggle to get several of them to the actual goal of graduation — missing a lot of classes, realizing they are “adults” and rebellious attitudes, etc. etc. There are at least 3 in the class right now that are in danger of not continuing and I would hate for them to miss the final goal after so many years of working with them and loving them. Please pray for motivation and surrender and humility so they can continue not only to graduation but into university next year.
That leads me to my next prayer request — the university!!! The professor who is working on all of the many legal papers needed to apply for approval says that by the end of this month he should be about finished with all the phases of the process. Please pray for things to go smoothly and that he will be diligent in pursuing the approval for Destino to open its university classes in September. We also will need much wisdom in the decisions about scheduling, hiring of teachers, application process for entering students, etc. It can be overwhelming when I look ahead too far but God will be faithful to give us direction each step of the way. I was very encouraged to know that we can legally American teachers for our university classes and they will only need an undergraduate degree, no masters. We will be looking for teachers for the year September 2018 to come as volunteers for 4-month periods to teach some of these courses for us. It will a real adventure and amazing to see how God will bring all of this together and provide the funds for the Honduran teachers that we need to hire as well. As I mentioned before, this will be the only free university for the poor in all of Central America — isn’t God amazing!!! Because of that fact, the professor (Dr. Melvin) believes it will be no problem getting our paperwork approved. He said the country is working on its social work in building houses for the poor, helping the poor with scholarships, etc, and they will delighted that there is now a place for some of these underprivileged students to further their education and seek careers. Thanks for your prayers for us in this new undertaking. We have enough classroom space for the upcoming year and, Lord-willing, in September will begin work on the construction of the college building to be read for 2018. Only God can do it but his resources and power are limitless!!!
We have two groups coming in March. Please pray for the planning and that God will accomplish what HE desires through these two groups. The first group comes from Texas (Jordan Mims is leading) and they will do a VBS in the village that we began working in last summer, Santa Rosita. Pastor Pablo went a few months back and showed the Jesus film in the school and the majority of the students gave their lives to Christ that day. This is a field white unto harvest and we are looking forward to working more with the students there. Also, I would appreciate MUCH PRAYER for a youth conference will be holding on Tuesday, March 14th — Jordan will be speaking to the junior high and high schoolers and we are praying for REVIVAL among our students. As is the case with many young people who are raised in a Christian environment or attend Christian school all of their lives, a majority of our students know the truth and know Jesus personally but do not have a passion to follow Him and are being influenced by the influences in their villages. The day will have several teaching sessions and also games and activities for all the students — thank you for praying fervently that God will touch the hearts of our students in a huge way and they will surrender more of their lives to Him in sincerity!!
While this group from Texas is here, another group is coming in from Phoenix, Arizona, to construct a project known as “sustaining a village” project. I don’t know all the details but it involves digging a pond and stocking it with tilapia fish and building above that a platform on which chickens will live and the poop of the chickens feeds the fish and then there is a drain line off the pond into gardens all covered by solar panels — it is to produce for us fish, chicken, eggs and vegetables. Amazing project and will be a huge blessing to Destino as well as a model for teaching our agriculture students in the university. We will be inviting those students and possibly our seniors this year to help in the project so they may be able to teach others. I’m really excited about this project, even though I don’t really understand it at this point. Thanks for your prayers.
We have been completing a lot of small but necessary projects lately. We put up fencing around the half of the soccer field that was on the edge of a deep drop so that the kids don’t have to be chasing balls into the woods all the time. We built some bleachers by the basketball court. We are in the process of putting in drop ceilings in the school classrooms because we need to deal with the problem of the heat radiating off the tin roofs. Another thing which I finally decided to do is to build a pool. It is actually very inexpensive here and I had been reluctant before because of the matter of safety but we will be building a high fence around the pool and putting serpentine wire above it (and we also have a full-time watchman in the night). We spend so much money each year to travel to another city once a month to take the kids to swim on the really hot days that we can cover the price of building the pool in less than a year of traveling to other places to swim. My biggest reason though is that the majority of our 300 students in the school do not know how to swim and there are many rivers around their villages. Every year many children and adults drown in Honduras because they do not know how to swim. We think the pool will be ready in about 5 weeks and I can bring a different class over every week to teach swimming lessons. Thanks for praying for us to get this done quickly. (Also the pool will not be deeper than 5 feet and we will not have a diving board — more safety precautions!).
So much is going on each day and we appreciate your prayers for all of the projects and for your individual prayers for your sponsored students. They really need continued prayer in the situations they face each day. Thank you so much for your faithfulness. We also ask you to continue praying for the funds we need and for wisdom each day to follow exactly in what God wants us to do at Destino del Reino. I don’t ever want to run ahead of Him nor fall behind him in fear. He continues to stretch my faith and the only thing that could stop Him from continuing to build this ministry bigger and greater is ME, if I freeze up in fear and don’t believe Him and don’t continue obeying what He shows me to do and trust Him. Thanks for your prayers for more faith for me each day!!
Please remember that you cannot hit “reply” to this message but if you would like to write me directly, my email is rhondadestino@yahoo.com Thanks again for your prayers. We need them desperately!!!
Because of His grace,
Rhonda
