I spent the last five days in Honduras for the opening of a church building for the United Methodist Church in Ciudad Espana.  It was a wonderful experience.  Three years ago I was present for the ground breaking.  Since then twenty teams from the church have gone to Ciudad Espana both to work on the construction of the church and to provide medical care.  As a congregation you have funded the building of this facility, which includes a library, computer lab, a clinic, classrooms and a sanctuary designed to be used for a host of different purposes.  The town’s people are generally poor (living on around $100 per month per household).  They were relocated to this village after their homes were destroyed by Hurricane Mitch.   Yet I am always reminded when visiting Honduras that we need to carefully think about what we mean by poverty.  Poverty cannot be defined simply by income levels, nor by the absence of the things we take for granted in America.  There is a joy and happiness among so many of the “poor” that I met in Honduras that raises the question of who is really poor and who is rich.  Women carrying their laundry down a hillside to wash their clothing together in the river might be a sign of poverty.  But if  you look carefully you’ll see that there is a joy as they talk and wash together.  I had to wonder if the quality of their lives would really be improved if they had washers and dryers in each home?  We spent part of an afternoon at a rural Methodist church whose building was only a roof with no walls.  The people come to worship even when it rains (and the pastor assured us they get wet in worship when it rains).   The homes in that rural village were built of mud. Water was hauled in buckets from a central source, sometimes miles away.  Roosters walked in and out of the homes.  But there was a joy on the faces of those I met living in this place.  Gone was the fast paced life and the insatiable desire for more that is often seen in our country.  Gone too was the sense of “aloneness” that seems to characterize many in our society.   There is real physical poverty in Honduras - a poverty where people live without adequate food, clothing, shelter, drinking water, and access to basic healthcare.   As a church we are playing a part in eradicating this kind of poverty.  But being in Honduras made me think about how impoverished some of us in America are - we have comfort and convenience, but we’ve isolated ourselves from our neighbors, charged up our credit cards in order to support our lifestyle, and often exist without really living.  Sometimes I wonder if we’re happier or more fulfilled than the villagers I met living in their mud houses.  Below is a photo of three of the children of Ciudad Espana.  In the background is the church we built that was dedicated this last weekend.