We send you our warm greetings from the Living Waters Ranch, the rural homestead where we live and serve in Honduras. Here we will share with you our most recent updates and photos of the work the Lord has entrusted us. We would also like to send our sincere thanks to all those who continue to pray for and financially support this grassroots mission even during difficult times. We thank God for you, and we want you to know that as a ministry we have lacked nothing throughout the many months of quarantine and uncertainty. Thank you!
Here I am with one of our foster sons, now age 13, as we engaged in a painting project at a neighbor’s home. The Lord has led us to serve our neighbors in creative ways over the past several months, and our foster teens serve right alongside us as instruments of God’s love in action. (Yes, that is sweat drenching my shirt! It is very hot in Honduras, and most families don’t have air-conditioning in their homes!)
The family whose home we helped paint unexpectedly offered us dinner after several hours of joyful labor. The young lady in the red shorts is our eldest foster daughter, now age 20, with whom we are now enjoying a blossoming and healthy relationship after she unexpectedly left our home last year. Many of our triumphs throughout the months of quarantine have to do with restored and deepened relationships for God’s glory.This is our adorable (and highly sanguine) special-needs foster son, now age 12, who lived under our care from age 6 to age 10. He now lives full-time with Grandma, who is a loving and stable influence in his life. We maintain a close relationship with him, and he will actually be coming to stay with us for three months as Grandma will be away working in the United States during Christmastime. We hosted him last year in similar fashion, and we are excited to offer him the blessing of Christian hospitality once more. In general, our ranch where we live and serve has become a place that many have come to consider home and where many learn biblical truth and experience God’s love.Our dedicated staff of local missionary-teachers continues teaching out of their homes during the months of quarantine. Here one of our veteran missionary-teachers is imparting his advanced math class with a small group of students in his dining room. Here is one of our foster daughters (left, age 16) and one of our local students studying for an exam on their teacher’s front lawn. Academics now go far beyond the traditional classroom walls!
Here is another one of our local students attending a tutoring session in her teacher’s home. General educational standards in Honduras tend to be very low, and the quarantine has definitely complicated the situation further. Nonetheless, our staff has found creative ways of ensuring that our students don’t fall too far behind during these difficult times.
Here is another one of our local missionary-teachers leading hands-on learning in the context of her own home. She teaches a weekly cooking class with our four foster daughters.
Here is another one of our precious local students receiving classes in her teacher’s home. No more school uniforms during quarantine!
Here are a few of the youth who participate weekly in a Christian discipleship group in our local community. Two of our local missionary-teachers (a married couple) direct the group out of their home and organize many service projects and evangelistic outings for the youth to put their faith into practice. They frequently do food drives for poor families and pray for those who are sick and downtrodden in our rural neighborhood.Here are two of our local missionary-teachers (white shirt and teal shirt) along with some of our foster daughters and local youth during a recent event we held in our home.
Throughout the summer and early fall months we celebrate many back-to-back birthdays in our family. Here is one of our foster daughters enjoying her special moment at her teachers’ home during a surprise celebration they organized for her.
After seven months of strict quarantine, certain restrictions in our area have been lifted and we were finally able to organize an outing to our local park for an afternoon of healthy play with some of our local students and favorite people!
This is a photo my husband Darwin took recently of a corner of our rural ministry homestead. Throughout quarantine he has been working several days per week in agriculture and maintenance alongside a small, dedicated team of local young men in order to care for and improve the land. Every morning before beginning their manual labor Darwin leads a devotional and prayer time with the young men who work with him.Here is our large, unconventional family (along with two of our beloved local students thrown in) at our eldest daughter’s recent birthday celebration.
God bless you and your loved ones! Please don’t hesitate to reach out if we can be praying for you in any way.
Yesterday evening we sat around the wooden table in our living room to eat dinner together as a family. Two of our teen foster daughters had prepared a delicious chicken soup with rice. In our household our diet oftentimes consists of rice and beans, so this soup was a special treat. The plates and silverware were all laid out on our floral-print tablecloth that I had purchased at a local thrift store a couple months ago. A candle was placed in the middle of the setup, although on this occasion it remained unlit.
Eating dinner together as a family each night has not been one of our strong points during these first few years together as a foster family and ministry homestead. Oftentimes it has seemed like a triumph just to get to the finish line at the end of each day still standing, and to make any additional effort to prepare an evening banquet for close to a dozen people just seems overwhelming. Thus, on many occasions each person just warms up rice and beans that were leftover from lunch or whips up something light due to everyone’s distinct schedule (and Mom’s exhaustion).
Some of our kids go into town two evenings per week for their ballet class; one night a week we’re out at a neighbor’s house for a Bible study; some evenings Darwin is out counseling people in our neighborhood or organizing choir practices. Oftentimes our teens have group homework projects or are practicing their musical instruments in the evenings, thus it has not been easy to pin down all the highly active members of our household for a daily routine of eating together. I imagine that in any family if a daily dinner is going to be achieved, it must be carefully scheduled and protected.
So, that is what we’ve decided to do. At Darwin’s suggestion, on Sunday I designed a fairly simple daily dinner schedule (indicating whose turn it is to cook, as we already have a nightly cleaning schedule), and we’re committed to protect and enforce this even if fatigue or busyness threaten to put this priority on the back-burner.
Yesterday morning all seven of our foster kids had been in classes and Christian discipleship in our homeschool program that we operate out of our rural homestead from 7:00am — 3:00pm. I had taught group Bible study that morning; Darwin had taught classes all morning with his small group of wily second- and third-graders and directed the girls’ choir practice after lunch. Our eldest foster daughter had a one-on-one meeting with our Christian psychologist to continue navigating the waters of healing and restoration while also looking to the future to discern the vocation/purpose that the Lord has for her in these coming years. A couple of our girls had been in cooking class; I taught my math class with 16 teens earlier that morning before heading into town to attend a three-hour meeting with local government officials.
And so, we ate dinner as a family. Last night was our first attempt to follow this new dinner schedule, and it was successful. It was nothing spectacular, but we were together. At the beginning of the meal we all joined hands and bowed our heads as Darwin gave God thanks for the food, and then our 17-year-old daughter, the eldest, graciously served everyone’s food. Surprisingly she started with my plate, which was doubtlessly a gesture of friendship as we are both making the effort to improve our relationship after having gone through many rocky patches over these past few months. (This afternoon she and I have a ‘date’ planned as I’ve invited her on a bike ride around our neighborhood as an opportunity to spend more time together and connect.)
This new season has brought small but important changes such as our new family dinner routine that we will carefully put into practice.
Each night as our kids all head into their rooms for homework and rest, I put on a sermon or two on my laptop (connected to two little speakers) in the living room so that our household is flooded with Biblical teaching. This specifically has been a very pivotal change in our home, as over these past several months I have downloaded dozens of sermons from respected pastors from different parts of the world to come directly into our home and teach us each evening. Our kids are resting in their rooms or taking a shower in the quiet of the night and everyone is receiving Scriptural encouragement. This has been very fruitful, and we will continue to do this each evening as we sow seeds into their young lives (and our own lives) for God’s glory.
Another small change we’ve made is that our 10-year-old foster son Jason, who is in the process of being legally adopted by us along with his two older sisters, now accompanies Darwin each night to go walk down our long gravel entryway to lock the two gates on our rural property. This gives him ‘man time’ with Dad and teaches him that it will one day be his job to protect and care for his own family.
Yesterday evening as our dinner was coming to a close, one of our new foster teens who moved in with us late last year expressed a question she had after having read the book of Galatians in the Bible for a homework assignment I had given her. I was pleasantly surprised to hear that she had actually read it and with enough attention to want to ask me a question about what she had read. I asked her to bring her Bible to the dinner table to show me the verse she had a question about, so she darted off into her room and quickly reappeared at the table, Bible in hand. As she opened the Bible, she said to herself as she flipped through the pages, “Galatians. After Corinthians.”
It was so seemingly insignificant what she was saying, but it hit me like a train. It’s working! Many of our foster kids and local students are very used to hearing others teach them about God’s Word, but they had yet to develop the habit of reading it for themselves. To change that, several months ago we started a routine that each person in our family now individually reads the Bible as we all spread out in our living room on Saturday and Sunday mornings, and in the two classes that I teach in our community homeschool (advanced math and reading/writing) I now make all the students sit individually and read the Bible 15 minutes before starting each class and then they discuss in partners what they read for about 5 minutes afterward (to get them used to openly talking about God’s Word). In these last couple months they’ve read the whole book of John and of Romans; they are now in Acts and Luke. (This specific daughter of ours is in both my classes, so she receives a double-dose of Bible-reading!) This has thus far produced marvelous results, as many of the teens have commented in awe, “I always hear so-and-so saying that we should love one another, and now I get that it actually comes from the Bible! I just read it!”
Our foster daughter who had been well-versed in Christianity throughout her childhood in various foster homes and orphanages, several months ago had very little first-hand knowledge of the actual Bible. When asked to flip to a certain book, she had to go to the table of contents and spend several moments searching for it. For her to say, “Galatians. After Corinthians.” and find that tiny book in the midst of 65 others is of great encouragement to me as she is now getting to know God’s Word not based on what others tell her but based on her own time reading and exploring its depths. Praise God!
There is much more I could write, but for now I will leave it at that. Thank you so much to those who support this mission and pray for us regularly. I continue to sleep much better in recent months after having battled insomnia for so many years, and after being bedridden with Typhoid Fever a few weeks ago my health is currently fairly strong. My husband Darwin and I will be celebrating 5 years of marriage this Sunday, and all of the local Honduran missionaries and teachers who serve alongside of us at the Living Waters Ranch are doing very well.
Please continue to pray for the restoration and transformation of our foster children/teens and local students into the image of Christ, and also pray that the Lord would continue to protect us physically as we live in a very violent part of the world.
Below are our current prayer requests and triumph reports from our life of service with Christ in Honduras. Thank you for your interest in supporting/following this work.
***All of the photos on this post were taken by Isabel Dayton during her visit to the Living Waters Ranch a couple months ago. Even though the work at the ranch has continued onward in my absence and I’m in frequent touch with those in Honduras, we don’t have any new photos at this time. (I’ll try to take some once I’m back in the routine of service next week.) Thank you and God bless!
1. We are coming to the end of our second full school year of Spirit-led “discipleship-based community homeschool” with roughly 40 students who meet daily in our home (the Living Waters Ranch) for a complete homeschool curriculum that we’ve designed/tweaked over these last two years as God has led. The Honduran school calendar runs from February — November, so we are nearing the end of school and are reflecting back on all that has happened this year. The Lord brought new key Honduran missionaries/teachers/pastors to our team; He brought additional students, all of whom come from very broken places; and we’ve all learned a lot (sometimes the hard way) and are actively drawing near to the Lord as we seek to walk alongside of the children/youth in our school in the Way of Christ. We simply give thanks to God for allowing us to participate on this great adventure and for the fact that many kids/teens are coming into a saving knowledge of Christ and are genuinely walking with Him. Nothing has been easy, but it has absolutely been worth it. Classes will wind down and come to a close in November, and then all of our teachers and students will reconvene in early January to begin prayerfully planning for the new school year. Please continue to pray for God’s protection and blessing over our community homeschool — the lives of all our students, that of our teachers, the physical protection of our property where we live and serve, etc — as Honduras is a very dangerous country. He has protected us until now, so we eagerly press onward.
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2. We thank God for His continued provision over our lives, as we have lacked nothing in these 5+ years of serving Christ by faith in Honduras. We thank God for His miraculous provision (in every sense of the word — financial provision, His way of bringing each of our local teachers/missionaries to work alongside of us, His provision of believers who actively intercede for this mission, people who lend us their expertise, the wisdom and discernment He has provided when we have needed it most, etc) and stand in awe of His power made manifest in our little corner of the globe. Thanks be to God.
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3. We are currently facing several potential complications/frustrations in regards to the process of legally adopting 4 of the 8 children my husband and I are fostering. We have had to switch lawyers and are having to re-submit much of our paperwork, so please pray first and foremost that this process (which tends to put our nerves on end, especially as we are coming into close contact with a third-world government that suffers from great corruption, inefficacy, etc) would bring us great joy rather than stress, as we are earnestly convinced that God wants us to be family forever to our kids, and that makes the legal hassles and uncertainties worth it. Please pray that the government may have favor upon us, that everything would be expedited as much as possible, and that all monetary costs involved in the adoption would be provided for (as all of our needs are). Thank you.
4. I will give a quick update in regards to 12-year-old Josselyn, one of the young women who has formed part of our family since July 2015 and for whom many of you had been praying in months prior. She had gone through a very rough season earlier this year as she even ran away from our home twice in search of her biological family (where she had been sexually abused and generally neglected), thus I had solicited urgent prayer on her behalf. She continues to live with us to this day, and she has not run away again (or even threatened to do so) in these last several months. She and her little sister Gabriela (Gaby) are currently in a season of monthly monitored visits with their biological family members, and thus far we have been able to maintain a respectful relationship and kind with them, so we thank God for this emotional stability in Josselyn’s life as she has accepted that her home (at least for now) is with us, and we ask God’s continued blessing and guidance over these monthly family visits. We are unable to adopt these two girls because their biological family is still closely involved, so we simply ask that each day the Lord would accompany us as we seek to parent and love them without holding on too tightly or feeling threatened by their biological family. Our payer is that the peace of Christ reign in our relationship with our 2 girls and their biological family members, and that God’s will be freely done. Amen.
5. Lastly, as many were informed, I had come back to the States for roughly five-and-a-half weeks in August/September for emergency medical, spiritual and emotional intervention as I had reached a breaking point in Honduras and could not go on without receiving help. I had been struggling with debilitating insomnia for several years and, as a result, had contracted any and all viruses, tropical fevers, etc, one right after another and was spending more time in bed receiving shots/IVs/antibiotics than I was participating in our daily life of service, so I accepted my parents’ offer at help and came back to San Antonio, TX in search of healing. I’ve written about this journey in greater detail in the prior post, so you may click on it if you would like to know more about my healing journey. I will be heading home to Honduras in three days. Please continue to pray for my ongoing recovery so that I may be as healthy of an instrument as possible in God’s hands, and let us thank Him for fully orchestrating my visit to San Antonio, my diagnosis, several breakthroughs I experienced, provision to cover medical costs, etc. Thank you.
I could probably list many more prayer requests and triumphs, but I will leave it at that for now. If you or anyone you know is not currently receiving our periodic printed newsletter and would like to receive it (it contains photos, testimonies/stories, etc, very similar to this blog), please send me via email that person’s name and physical mailing address so that they may be included on the mailing list. Thank you again for partnering with us in this amazing Kingdom work; God bless you.
A couple months ago I wrote about my encounter with Katy, the younger biological sister of two of our foster daughters. Since then there has been much back-and-forth communication with the local government agency in regards to rescuing Katy out of what might be a situation of abuse/neglect (as was the case for her two sisters), and several weeks ago the agency’s lawyer finally made the visit to investigate Katy’s living situation further. The lawyer informed us that she saw nothing out of order and that the final verdict is that Katy will remain living with her biological family. The lawyer did comment, however, that it appears that Katy has a mental illness in addition to the girls’ mother, whom the lawyer met in person (I have yet to meet her, but we have heard stories about her). That is the agency’s final answer, so we choose to be at peace with this, and we hope and pray that Katy is, in fact, safe and well-cared-for with her biological family (as is the hope for any child). This information regarding the mother’s mental illness also helps us as we parent 11-year-old Gabriela, whom we also suspect has some degree of mental illness, which might be genetic or incurred due to sexual abuse. Please continue to pray for little Gabriela (Gaby) and her 13-year-old sister Josselyn as both girls this month reached their two-year anniversary of living in the protection of our home. Pray also for our relationship with the girls’ biological family, as we are currently in a season of supervised family visits each month and are carefully handling this relationship so that it may produce blessing for all involved.
My husband Darwin gives weekly music lessons not only in our community homeschool for local students but also individually with the majority of our foster/adopted children. This is a photo he took of a late-night ‘orchestra’ training as he brought everybody together to practice their instrument for several hours prior to a public recital they would be hosting. Darwin is currently offering recorder, piano, guitar, violin and choir lessons to more than a couple dozen at-risk youth in our rural neighborhood free of charge.
Darwin singing opera with a broom as a microphone on the front porch of our elementary school house
13-year-old Sindy (right), one of our extremely involved local students, enjoying the antics of “Mr. Darwin,” her beloved teacher
Christ’s Functioning Body: Relational Discipleship/Community Development in Our Rural Neighborhood
We are so thrilled and thankful that the team of local teachers, mentors and pastors that God has united this year at the Living Waters Ranch continues to work in harmony as we seek to open our homes and lives to lost youth for God’s glory. Domingo, a local pastor in his 50’s with a background in military service has opened up his church and his carpentry shop after-hours to the teenagers in our program, and local young couple Erick and Aracely have gone to extraordinary lengths to receive the local teens in their home at all hours as God has stationed them in a strategic part of our neighborhood close to several of our local students. They have been used by God to give advice and counsel, pray, direct a weekly youth Bible study, lend a hand in service to poor neighbors, etc, out of a response to serve Christ in integral discipleship. Many of our local teenage students, especially the young men, have been deeply impacted by Erick’s commitment, openness and example, and we are seeing very real transformation occur in the lives of several of them. Please join with us in thanking God for His provision in these faithful laborers as we are truly serving as Christ’s body (several different functions but with the same overall purpose) to instruct these youth in the Way of Christ with the hope of training them up to be useful instruments in God’s hands.
Jeffrey, one of our 12-year-old local students in first grade at the Living Waters Ranch, doing a community service project under Erick’s guidance on the weekend (they were helping build a home for a local single mom).
Here are several more of our local youth involved in the community service project Erick designed for those who participate in his discipleship group. (Community service projects among Hondurans are generally very rare, so this step to reach out and show God’s tangible love to a neighbor is a really huge step that these youth had likely never been guided to take before.)
Here is a photo Erick and his wife took during a recent youth group gathering in their home on a Monday night. Three of our teenagers (Brayan, Dayana and Jackeline) participate in addition to several of our local students and neighbors. Erick is a highly gifted and knowledgeable teacher of God’s Word, and he has a passion to form humble, dedicated followers of Christ.
Guard Dog’s Puppies to be Used as Instrument of Blessing to Neighbors
Although this headline might not be the most important on the list, just the same we are very excited that one of our guard dogs recently gave birth to five healthy puppies. The pups’ dad is our Rottweiler, so they promise to be large and fearsome (at least in appearance). Good, large guard dogs in Honduras are extremely valuable (and sometimes difficult to come by), so we are thankful that we will be able to bless several of our key neighbors with a healthy puppy that will in turn patrol their property.
This is our 9-year-old son Jason enjoying our puppies a few days after they were born…
Christian Psychologist Invests in Our Girls’ Healing During a Week of Intensive Workshops and Group Therapy
Last month (June 2017) we enjoyed the visit of a dear missionary who has been living in Central America many years. She first spent time with our girls during a week of intensive activities in December 2016. We are thankful for this key relationship and influence in our girls’ development into healthy, wise daughters of God, and we look forward to receiving her in our home again at the end of the year.
This is our eldest daughter, 16-year-old Dayana, who has been living with us almost four years and whom we are in the process of legally adopting
This is 13-year-old Jackeline who has been living in our family two-and-a-half years and who has undergone drastic transformations in her character and work ethic for God’s glory
This is 13-year-old Josselyn enjoying a goofy moment! You go, girl!
In Good Standing with Local Government; Prayer Sought that Blessing and Healthy Communication Might Continue
Enjoying good communication and mutual understanding with authorities in Honduras is not something that is perhaps easily achieved or sustained as corruption may always lie just around the corner in addition to the fact that many laws and governmental expectations seem to be ever-changing and interpreted differently by each person. Thus, we plainly thank God for His constant protection over us and for having bestowed His blessing upon the numerous relationships we hold with local authorities (police, educational authorities, etc). Please pray with us that peace and good standing may continue, as the task of updating and presenting paperwork, seeking out meetings, etc, is ongoing as we earnestly desire to do everything with the highest integrity possible.
This is our 12-year-old daughter Gleny, who has been living in our family almost four years, giving a dynamic tutoring session with our two most developmentally-challenged kids, Gabriela (11) and Josue (9). Gleny is a fantastic teacher, and she loves working with little kids!
Experience and Wisdom Gained This Year; Students’ Growth and Development Noteworthy
As we’ve reached (and crossed!) the half-way point of another year serving as Christ’s messengers in rural Honduras, we thank God for the experience and wisdom we’ve gained. We are now a year-and-a-half into the journey of directing a discipleship-based community high school (and expanding elementary school) in our rural homestead, and we’ve learned a lot of lessons along the way! We truly thank God for the progress gained, both in our experience as leaders/servants and in the lives of the children and youth in our program, who likewise are experiencing revolutionary changes in their lives as God is impacting and transforming them with the good news of peace with God through Jesus Christ. As we enter the second half of our school year (the Honduran school calendar goes from January/February — late November), we currently have 37 full-time students plus a small handful of local youth who participate in select activities/Bible studies we offer but are not completely engaged every day. Praise God!
These were the only four students who successfully avoided after-school detention during the second grading period (two months)! They were very diligent to complete their homework on time and fulfill all expectations placed upon them. Keep up the good work! (We told all our other students to pick these guys’ brains to see what their secret is so that they can hopefully avoid going to detention as well!)
These were the students who achieved academic excellence in the second grading period!
This crowd had perfect attendance during the months of April and May! Way to go! (I remember last year when it was a huge struggle just getting the kids to come to class! Thank God for these wonderful blessings of progress and maturity in our students!)
Prayer Sought for Ongoing Unity and Development in Our Large Foster/Adoptive Family of 10
Please continue to pray for Darwin and I as we are nearing the four-year mark of parenting children who come from very broken places. Our eldest daughter will be turning 17 years old in three months (oh my gosh!), and our youngest son (Josue, who has special needs) just turned 9. As everyone is making a quick sprint towards maturity, please pray for us as we continue to fine-tune our skills as parents. Pray that our kids (and teens) would always be given a soft, malleable heart in regard to discipline and correction, and pray with us that God would truly grant our kids wisdom and grace as they grow in Christ. We have seen tremendous strides in each of our kids’ lives since they’ve been under our care, and we humbly ask that Father God may grant us perseverance, abundant love and the Biblical wisdom needed to truly parent these kids well. During this second half of the year, God has led me to teach less classes in our discipleship-based community homeschool in order to be more present to our 8 kids as just plain ‘mom’, faithfully prepare family dinners each day, etc. (I’m trying to be a stay-at-home mom and run an organization/ministry! Pray for me!) Below are photos we took during our weeklong family retreat last month. These periodic family retreats are a simple yet powerful step we’re taking to strengthen family ties and form healthy memories together in our family that’s building its nest behind schedule.Â
Darwin playing music on the porch of the little rustic 2-room cabin we rented.
Jackeline and I embarking on our wild kayaking adventure from one island to another. Little did we know just how difficult it would be, as the current was particularly strong that day as it threatened to carry us out to high seas! Arriving (and safely returning) from the arduous journey was probably the hardest thing either of us had done in quite some time! (We look so happy in this photo because we had yet to commence the journey and had no idea how hard it would be! The next day Darwin and our 16-year-old son Brayan tried completing the same journey, but they returned because Brayan got scared!)
Kayaking together proved to be an excellent experience in teamwork and communication (and emotional control, as both of us felt like screaming or crying on several occasions!)
Hidden Treasures: Seeking the Kingdom of God in Honduras 