Adventures of the White House: A Light of Hope in the Midst of a Dark Situation

Hello friends…this will be a quick update as we are about to leave ABTS for the week to spend time helping with a camp for about 100 Bedouin children. We will be up in the hills, supposedly based at a monastery, so we are hoping for some peaceful space even in the midst of 100 kids! We will have a bit of an introduction to the camp structure tonight (Sunday) and then head up to the monastery with the rest of the “staff” for a bit of a retreat before the children arrive tomorrow…
Unfortunately, we won’t be around internet in order to keep you posted as we go, but we will try to write another update when we return to Beirut on Friday. In the meantime, please enjoy some pictures from our time with the kids from Home of Hope this past week…we would appreciate your prayers for this place because as it stands now, they can only stay open until the end of August. If something doesn’t change for them financially, then about 60 kids will lose their only home. We got a chance to meet with World Vision this past week as well and talked with them about our experiences there earlier in the week. This morning at church, we introduced the young Mennonite couple who is currently volunteering at Home of Hope to the same person we met with from World Vision (we’ve noticed that the community here is small enough that many representatives of different places we have worked with during our time here all attend the same church at least part of the time, so we get to continue our ties with them and introduce them to one another! ☺ ). Who knows if anything will come of this connection, but we continue to hope that these kids will somehow be provided for…
So we begin our last full week here in Lebanon…the time has gone by quickly even though each day has often felt very full and like a week in itself! We will return to Beirut at the end of this week to have a few more meetings and some fun before we leave for a week in Jordan. We appreciate your continued prayers for our travel here and there and for energy and strength for the different cultural dynamics this week will bring.