The Power of Prayer...

It was the summer of 2003, I was in Juarez during my 7 month stay as a missionary.

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One of the groups from the US had come down for a week to build a home. This group I remember was from Arkansas. As one of their nightly activities, they wanted to take a bunch of rosaries around to the neighborhood families and ask them if they wanted to pray.

I decided to take them to a back neighborhood that was filled with cardboard houses, dirt floors and no running water. Specifically I took them to a family who had become special friends to me. Upon each arrival, the mother, Marla, would yell for her 8 year old son, hand him two small coins and off he went to the local store to purchase some Coke to quench their visitor's thirst. This was always such a gift from the family, knowing that they could not afford Coke for the family, and would rather give it as a gift than drink it themselves.

So with a glass of Coke in hand, the 3 group members from Arkansas, myself, Marla and her son all prayed together in 2 languages. After the prayer, in tears, Marla confessed to praying for a new home for her family of 6. This inevitably brought the rest of us to tears as well, as we hugged, thanked her for her time and headed back home.

On the way back, I told the group members that since I met the family it had been a dream of mine to build them a house, but there was no way that would happen as there was a 3 year waiting list before a family could get a house built by the program. It was just a dream...

The night before the group left, two of the members cornered me and asked if they got the $3,500 needed to build a house and the man power to do it, if we could skip to the front of the line to build a house for Marla's family. "Well, I mean, yeah I think so," I replied. "Good, then get us on the calendar, because we want to do it!"

After raising more then $5,000 for the current house, they put their funds together to raise yet another $5,000 just to help make a dream of mine come true. I called some friends from Colorado, and they made the trek down to Juarez to help get the house built.

Only weeks before my departure back to the states, I led a group in the building of Marla's house. Each time I go back to Juarez I make a special trip to see the family. Each time I am greeted with a glass of Coke, hugs and tears from the family. They have a picture of me with the family above their kitchen table and I smile every time I see it.

It was Marla's dream to get a one room cinder-block house for her family, and my dream to build it. But I believe that without the prayer we shared on that hot summer day, neither dream would have come true.