Honduras update, the election, classes

Cori, Nate and the kids, along with the totality of Honduras have been soaked with torrential rains since Monday evening. A hurricane made landfall just south of them along the coast of Nicaragua late Monday afternoon. Since then, both countries have experienced extreme flooding. Nate and Matt Goins were out surveying the flooding yesterday and offering help to residents of the neighborhood adjacent to their church and the Children’s Home in a canoe, in the pouring down rain. It was quite the video Cori posted. Power had been off and on through the downpours and cellular service had been interrupted on multiple occasions for varying lengths of time. We got the latest update this morning while Cori had service. We do not know how long her service will last. I anticipate there will be further interruptions as the effects of the storm are dealt with in the weeks to come. I can only imagine the plight of those families we saw when we were in Honduras a year ago who were living in shanty houses made of cardboard and scrounged pieces of wood along a dirt “road” that outlines a large sugarcane field. Much less the effects on those who had chosen to build hovels on the banks of a creek near the church. This will be a desperate time for both of those countries as they care for the displaced, the injured and the dead. Please keep them in your prayers.

The best I can say about the election we are suffering through is that President Trump will not go down without a fight. The corruption is not even being masked in this election and it is very hard to believe that everyone on the Republican ticket in most of the down ballot races did very well while our incumbent president did not. That could only happen through cheating. How that will be resolved remains to be seen, but I can be confident that regardless of the outcome, two things will evidence themselves. One, our president will not casually abandon his base. More importantly, God is fully in control. The Bible tells us there is no place for liars in Heaven. So, whether in this life or our eternal life, judgement will be meted out. We must leave that to God.

My deeper concern is about those who call themselves Christians who willingly voted for a party whose foundational doctrine is the wanton killing of babies in the womb – up to and after the point of that baby being born. That in and of itself would be enough to vote against that party, regardless of the opposition party candidate. Talk about being given over to a “reprobate mind”. Our pride and our selfishness have taken hold to the point that God is no longer the primary influence of moral rectitude in many of the hearts of those that call themselves Christian. We, as believers, are responsible for that failing within the church having replaced true worship with religious convenience, true repentance with come-as-you-are, stay-as-you-are preaching. Never-the-less, the lies and hypocrisy have been put on full display. What comes next is in His capable hands, but we have been fully warned what we are up against. Shame on those who choose not to see it.

This month and the first two weeks of next month will be filled with classes for me to teach. It is nice to be busy. It is nicer to meet some of the new recruits to our company. Since many of the classes scheduled are internal, I get to take a more relaxed approach to the instruction format and be much less formal. More time for questions, more time for deeper discussions than is available in the classes that clients pay for. There will also be several of those classes in the mix, but when I teach or present the class to our company folks, I can take the more casual relaxed and any question of fair game – regardless of the subject.

The internal class I taught on Tuesday would normally take me four hours to present. With the numerous questions and discussions throughout the class, it took a little over six hours to get through. But, the information, as it relates directly to what we do as a core activity for our company, was helpful to our employees. Especially the newer ones. I got a lot of very positive feedback, which always surprises me since I consider the information more or less common knowledge. However, as I am often reminded, common knowledge is not so common.

Tomorrow I am not teaching the scheduled class, but I have to be at the office early to get the class set up for the instructor. It will be his second class this week. If he had not been available, I would have had to teach four classes this week versus the two I did teach. Next week’s class is an in-person class but the following week is two internal classes with one external, online class. If our Democrat opponents are elected to the presidency, a lot of our clients will suffer greatly. We will suffer as a company in their losses. I am praying, for more reasons than the loss of jobs, that that does not happen.

Time will tell.