By Michelle de Carion, staff writer. Photos by David Morrison.

Nine-year-old Megan Hughey looks forward to meeting the newest bunch of Samaritan’s Purse volunteers every Tuesday when they come in to help rebuild her adopted mother’s house, which was destroyed in the tornado that hit Joplin, Missouri, about a year ago.

She and her two brothers survived the storm without a scratch, but the emotional trauma that resulted from losing their home only increased their grief after having also lost their adopted father in a tragic accident a few years before.

The volunteers have not only been helping rebuild their lives by providing them with a new house, but have also become playmates and friends to encourage their spirits.



Last week, Cara Polk came in with a group from Aztec, New Mexico, to volunteer. She is currently a grad student at the University of Notre Dame, studying Theology and Church History. She quickly finished up her final papers and exams then jumped onto a plane and headed out to Joplin to serve.

When interviewed while in Joplin last week, Cara said that God taught her a double lesson while working on the Hughey home with Megan:

“I am a perfectionist, and it was a little bit of a challenge for me to have Megan come around with me at first, helping me with the scraping and taping of the windows.



“She was kind of coming in, sweeping up dust, and it was going everywhere, and she was making the tape go across the windows, putting extra tape here and extra tape there. God was reminding me, ‘You know Cara, this is like you helping me with your hands, trying to do my work, and I accept you, and I want your heart.’

“It’s not about the quality of the work, it’s about the enthusiasm, and Megan was so enthusiastic; she was so excited to be helping. So God was reminding me, ‘Hey you are like Megan, and I love you and I want you to know that is what I want from you—this kind of enthusiasm when doing my work.’



“So on the one hand, it was a good reminder that I don’t have to be a perfectionist, and that God is not waiting for me to be perfect. On the other hand, I learned that I need to show the same grace to other people too.



“None of us are going to do perfect work, so that was a double lesson for me.”

By Dr. Tom Wood

Just a little over two years ago while on a Samaritan’s Purse mission outreach to rebuild the Chapel at African Bible College in Yekepa, Liberia, God showed me village after village where children were dying.

In today’s world, it is a terrible tragedy that every four seconds a child dies of easily preventable or treatable causes before reaching his/her 5th birthday. In addition, one mother dies every minute largely due to these same circumstances. Eighty percent of these deaths occur in Sub Saharan Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

The tragedy is made worse when you realize that the medicines and vaccines necessary to prevent these deaths are often available in urban centers, but not to rural villages. I was challenged to develop a program that could overcome this inequity, a program that could be sustained with limited resources and oversight.

As the Director of International Health Programs for Samaritan’s Purse, I was able to assemble a great team of health professionals who quickly caught this vision. Working and planning together over the next several months, we developed a program to enable villages around the world to form health committees.

The health committees would be tasked to select one person for every 30 households in the village to attend a six-week training program that will equip them to make simple diagnoses and provide immediate treatment, thus saving lives. This is the Village Samaritan program.

The program was implemented in four villages in Honduras. Last week, I attended the completion of the training of six excited and enthusiastic Village Samaritans by the great team at Samaritan’s Purse Honduras led by Dr. Janania Lul. Together with the people of Buenos Aires, Aqua Fria, San Alejo, and Caballo de Piedra, we celebrated the graduation of the first class. The six trainees will serve the basic medical needs of approximately 750 villagers in a remote area of the country.

By Simon Barrington, Executive Director of Samaritan’s Purse in the United Kingdom.

There is a group of Christians in northern Uganda that has been created to meet the needs of vulnerable families in their community. The name for their ministry group is God is Able. What a great name!

Although they have next to nothing, these 20 members of five different local churches have come together to care for 40 families at risk.

Their story has been inspiring and motivational.

After being trained by Samaritan's Purse, the group first set out to identify the needs of the community. They recognized that there were many widows living with HIV and AIDS, and many orphans left there as a result.

One such widow was Hazel. Hazel lost her husband to AIDS and is left caring for five children. The youngest, Grace, also has HIV.

Stigmatized by her home community, she was forced to move back to her ancestral homestead. There she came in contact with the God is Able missional community.

They have ensured that Hazel has access to medicine, which has started to improve her health and that of her daughter Grace. I saw the community come together to hoe and weed Hazel’s field so that her crop of Sim-Sim (Sesame) and Sorgum could flourish. It took them all day to clear the weeds, but now Hazel, who couldn’t have achieved it herself, has the opportunity to sell her crops and feed her family.

As we entered the community, the first thing that the God is Able group asked to do was to pray that they may be the hands and feet of Jesus in that area.

I believe they are already being Jesus to people like Hazel and that they are living out the truth that God is Able to provide for our needs in every circumstance as it says in 2 Corinthians 9:8. “God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work.”

By staff writer Chelsea Pardue

When I think of Jesus, I don’t often think of a real person. The idea of the Trinity is confusing, and it usually leaves me thinking that although Jesus walked around like each of us, He had the supernatural powers of God. That truth results in me thinking that He didn’t feel pain or suffering on this Earth, that because He is almighty and all-powerful He somehow was able to avoid real human feelings.

When I think of Jesus, I am grateful for His death and I appreciate His sacrifice. But I don’t always see it that way. After all, sometimes I think Jesus didn’t feel pain. And if He possessed all the qualities of His father, He was also omniscient. Even during His death, He knew He would rise again. In my simple human mind, death doesn’t seem so daunting if it only lasts a few days.

When I think of the Bible, I think of a book of stories. I studied Christianity in college, and I believe God’s Holy Word. But sometimes, in my simple human mind, those words were written so long ago they don’t seem real. Although I know Paul sat and labored over his letters, I don’t often think about it. I think of the Bible as something written by God, sent down from heaven, and removed from me by thousands of years.

Luckily, my simple human mind occasionally sees reality.

I recently saw reality in Lebanon, a land where Jesus walked and taught, while on an Operation Christmas Child trip. As I was delivering shoe box gifts underneath beautiful trees, I thought, this is the kind of place where Jesus could have taught. Still, it seemed removed from my life.

As I approached a pastor to ask him for an interview, I wasn’t prepared for the simple reality that was going to hit me. As the pastor and I made small talk, he looked at me and said, “Do you know about the Mount of Transfiguration?”

“Of course,” I replied.

He pointed into the distance and said, “That’s it.”

I looked at the snowcapped peak and immediately wondered if Jesus’ feet were cold when he was up there. As soon as I had that thought, I realized that Jesus was a real person. He felt cold snow on His sandaled feet. He felt sad when Peter betrayed Him. He felt each nail that was driven into his wrists and feet. He felt the lash of the whip as it ripped skin from His body.

He was perfect, but He wasn’t immune.

Jesus was a little more than 10 years older than me when His life ended. He had 33 years to accomplish God’s goal. Knowing His fate didn’t take the sting out of His death. He was fearful and felt alone, as evidenced by His cry, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachtani?”

There is something genuine about Jesus crying that God had forsaken Him. It makes Him human. It makes His sacrifice real.

And while I’ve always known that Jesus suffered, it took seeing the place where He ministered to make me fully understand the depth of His love for us—for us who He had never met, for us whose simple human minds can’t fully understand the concept of wholly human and wholly divine, for us who forget that the Bible is a biography.

When I asked the pastor how it felt to walk in the land of Jesus, He said, “It makes the Bible alive again.”

At that moment, I understood. The Bible is alive. It’s breathing life into all of us who accept that simple, but sometimes hard to grasp, truth. Jesus gave everything for us, and it wasn’t easier for Him just because He is the Son of God.

When I think of the humanity of Jesus, it makes it easy for me to put myself in His shoes. I wonder if I would have made the same choices in His position. Would I have endured ridicule and persecution? Would I have died for people I don’t know? I like to think I would have, but it’s more probable that I would have been Peter, denying everything to save myself.

That’s why I need Jesus’ death. More importantly, that’s why I need the life He gives.