Finding Promise in the Promised Land
Abraham liked to hang out in Beersheba, a southern city in Israel situated in the Negev desert. So do some recovering drug and alcohol addicts.
Every month, Heaven’s Family helps far more people than we could ever highlight in our bi-monthly newsletter. For that reason, this page contains additional photos and stories of some of the “least of these” among our spiritual family whom we’ve recently been blessed to serve.
Abraham liked to hang out in Beersheba, a southern city in Israel situated in the Negev desert. So do some recovering drug and alcohol addicts.
When kids venture off to their first year of college, many parents make the journey to help get them settled into the dorm room they'll call home for the next several months. Dorms are not always the nicest places to live, but just about every need of the student is catered to these days.
Modern Israel, I've come to find out, is not just the romanticized land of the Bible, but it's also a messy melting pot of people who often carry a lot of pain, and have found various self-destructive, addictive ways to suppress it—at least for a few hours. Take away modern technology, however, and life is not all that different from Jesus' day—instead of Samaritans there are Palestinians; instead of lepers there are drug and alcohol addicts. And then there are the women who, just like 2,000 years ago, feel they have no option for survival but to sell their bodies by the hour. For many Jews and Christians, these kinds of people are to be avoided.
During two lovely days of this trip to Ethiopia, I’ve had the blessing of visiting very poor women who’ve received two or three goats from Heaven’s Family. The goats—always at least one male and one female—are absolutely free, but there’s a catch. The women have to agree to pay us back in kids.
We've all watched the suffering of thousands as Hurricane Harvey mercilessly pounded Houston, Texas, and the surrounding areas, feeling painfully helpless to do anything about it. This was an unprecedented disaster in many ways.
This afternoon I had the bittersweet blessing of dedicating a new water well funded by Heaven’s Family’s Safe Water Ministry. It was sweet because the beneficiaries, tribespeople from miles around, have been drinking unsafe, muddy water all their lies. Now, for the first time, they will have pure, safe water to drink. They will no longer be plagued by waterborne diseases.