February 21, 2011: Love is in the Air!
~ by Father Ron Camarda
Beloved, I just got home from Honduras late last night. I started looking at the pictures and started to tear up. Stewardship is really about giving a little and receiving much more. It is about being open to receiving God’s love. I am reminded of the song we sang down in Honduras.
Open my eyes, Lord, help me to see your face. Open my ears, Lord, help me to hear your voice. Open my heart, Lord, help me to love like you. Open my heart, Lord help me to love. .I live within you, deep in your heart, O Love, I live within you, rest now in me!
God calls you and me, “O Love”. God shines on the good and bad, rich and poor, happy and sad. God loves us.
This picture of the team at the nutritional center tells it all. It was are last day and last stop. These children were saved from certain death. The coordinator of this nutritional center malnourished children and orphans, which Mission Honduras has been helping to support for at least the last 7 years tells it all. How bountiful God’s love is.
As a priest, I think the best thing I have ever done, was to show our team what to do in our 30 minute visit. I simply went into the bedroom with about 30 cribs and picked the children up and held them. I handed them to the team members. At first a couple of them had difficulty, and then they realized the gift in their arms. The children loved being held and touched. I remember how I was able to hold the children in Haiti at Mother Teresa of Calcutta’s home for malnourished children. We can all be stewards of holding children with love.
And so I wrote on 18 February as I bounced down the mountain:
A Medical Mission is really a mission into my own heart. Healing – Divine Takes place in me Joy fills my heart and flushes out my soul Only Love and Peace are left. .O Jesus, My Beloved, I love you All ways and Always The poor are always here Thank you for the poor I do not thank You for abject poverty But I thank you for the poor For they teach us so much Alleluia The food of the humble is so nourishing More so than many very elegant meals I have tasted We celebrated last night a fiesta – Thank You God! .
May our last days in Honduras be filled with more Wisdom And love for the Poor And Esperanza (that is Hope!) May we learn to cast our nets into the deep at Your command Jesus!
I love you, Ron Moses +
Father Ron Camarda is a retired Naval Chaplain and author of “Tear in the Desert,” a powerful book containing his memoirs of life and death at the Battle for Fallujah. Father Ron appears on EWTN and recently won the Silver Medal from the Military Writers Society of America.
