“Wow, God really is faithful!” state two brothers, Cristian and Byron, from one of the Toybox homes in Guatemala with huge smiles on their faces.

 

For the last year they have been praying for their two year old brother Pedro who had gone missing from the streets of Guatemala City.

 

The last they had heard was that he was living with his mother who worked at the market but then……….he disappeared.  They feared the worse but kept on praying faithfully. 

 

The story is that Pedro’s mother, unable to look after him, abandoned him one day, lying under a table in the market.  A lady found him malnourished and very small and took him to the police station.  He was then taken to live in a state institution for teenage boys. 

 

The staff there placed adverts in the paper and on the radio to try and find his family but for months no one came forward...until just recently.  Pedro’s uncle saw his photo in a newspaper and immediately made contact with the state institution.  He himself is extremely poor and so wasn’t able to take another child into his already large family.  When he told Cristian and Byron, you can just imagine their reactions!  Tears of joy all round! 

 

Together they asked El Castillo (Toybox partner organisation in Guatemala) if Pedro could join the El Castillo family. After discussions and meetings with the judge, he agreed that the best place for Pedro was to be moved into one of our family style homes for younger boys, near to his older brothers.

 

Shortly after Pedro moved into his new home, he celebrated his third birthday.  The look on his face when his very own birthday cake was brought in, with candles on, was absolutely stunning!  With his brothers and new family around him, Pedro felt special and loved.   

 

It’s so wonderful to see the transformation in these children’s lives. The two older brothers used to live on the streets of the city, involved in street life and all that goes with it. Today they have been rescued from the streets and are seeing God answer their prayers. They know that God listens to them and that He is interested in them. 

 

We live in a world of massive need.  The problems can seem overwhelming but one of the great things about being a Christian is that we can pray to the God who holds the whole of the world in His hands.  We won’t all go to Latin America to help the street children but we can all pray to the God who knows each of those children by name and who knows how and why they have ended up on the streets. 

 

I wonder though whether it can sometimes be quite easy to pray for miracles to occur without necessarily thinking too much about what it is we are asking for.  If I pray that God will bring a hope and a future to the street children, or if my request is that the hungry children of the world will be fed, what is it I am actually expecting to happen?

 

I guess that God could send food parcels from the sky but that’s not generally the way that He works.  For the hungry to be fed, the homeless to be provided with shelter and for those with no hope to be given opportunities for the future, God gives people the responsibility to act. 

 

As you pray, keep thinking about how God may be calling you to be part of the answer to the prayers that you pray.  What a privilege it is for us to be able to serve the King of Kings and to reach out to the poorest of the poor in love and compassion.  You may feel like your prayers are small or your gifts of time or money are not worth much, but when history draws to a close, you may well be surprised at all that God has achieved through that which you have done and prayed.