Check out my new “Videos” page (at left) to see clips from South Africa and Venezuela!

Every time I go to Venezuela, I forget a little more that the kids we’re ministering to have the pasts that they do.  With every trip comes new areas of healing and growth for them.  I delight in these children.  They are children, just like my nieces and nephews are.  They understand when they do good and they are disciplined when they are naughty just like children all over the world.

Here’s a story about discipline:

The guard that Tony hires to protect the orphanage during the nights had a cell phone stolen the second to last evening that we were there.  We, as a team, didn’t know about it until we were on our way into the local town on foot.  My black sandals were a dull gray from dust by the time I arrived at the small one-room church that could barely contain children and American visitors from the Home of Refuge orphanage.  There would probably have only been ten people at the service if we hadn’t joined them that day.

We noticed a handful of the boys from our Home of Refuge family were missing from this excursion and later found out that ten of them were sent to their rooms due to the stolen phone incident.  Stealing is, obviously, not acceptable.  Just as we would teach our kids how wrong it is to steal, Tony teaches his kids the same thing.  He wants these children to understand that they don’t have to do that anymore.  These children are used to lying, cheating, manipulating, begging and stealing to get what they need.  Unfortunately, these are habits learned living on the streets as Tony knows too well, growing up on the streets himself.  Though these kids know that all of their needs (and a lot of their wants) are provided for at the Home of Refuge, old habits die hard.  Like they do in all of us. 

The ten boys became known as the Dirty Diez.  Hopefully I don’t have to tell you that that’s a spin off of the Dirty Dozen.  What made this situation comical was the fact that the boys’ rooms have a normal door and a type of screen door without the screen.  It’s really a barred door that allows you to leave the normal door open in the hottest months so that a breeze will come through.  This day the normal doors were open and only the ”screen doors” were closed allowing plenty of air to blow through.  Anytime a team member would pass by the rooms housing the Dirty Diez, a passel of skinny brown arms would shoot out between the bars of the door as though it were a prison cell and they would holler out wanting you to come see them while they enviously watched the other kids play at will.

A few memorable photos (one such above) were taken of those being disciplined, peeking their faces out through the “prison bars”.  It reminded me of getting in trouble when I was younger.  Going to your room felt as bad as being sent to prison.  You couldn’t understand why you were made to sit in there, bored out of your mind, for hours (in reality only 5 minutes) when you really just wanted to go and continue to play without receiving the consequences of being bad.

Finally, Tony, being the tender-hearted Father that he is, let the boys come out after the phone miraculously turned back up.  They’d all learned the lesson of how severe it is to steal.  The boys ran out hooping and hollerin’ and ran circles around the other kids in incredible bursts of delayed energy.  Since this was our last day at the orphanage, we were happy that they had been released on good behavior so we could spend time with the naughty ones before leaving.

We’re really all the same, aren’t we?  We all need people to love us, touch us, encourage us, show us the right way, provide for us, protect us and discipline and rebuke us.  No matter where we come from or what we’ve been through, we can’t develop in a healthy way without these things. 

Proverbs 3:12 “because the LORD disciplines those he loves, as a father the son he delights in.”  The next time God ’sends me to my room’, I will remember that it’s for my good, to learn to be different than I was when I was an orphan who desperately needed rescuing.