“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may
be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the
evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and unrighteous”
(Matthew 5).
This site is a record of our journey as we
learn to love like God loves, like the rain falls...without reservation
or prejudice, soaking dry ground, filling empty places. In January,
we'll travel to the Dominican Republic with a group of students and
parents representing Rockford Christian School, working in some of the
poorest communities outside Santo Domingo.
Over the past five years, RCS students and parents have served in those villages:
• helping to build and furnish 18 homes, providing shelter for nearly 100 people,
• building a bathroom for a family who didn't have one,
• raising money for 10,000 bottles of water to be sent to Haiti,
• renovating a playground and helping to build two others,
•
throwing Christmas parties at a leper hospital and at the mission's
physical therapy center, giving out over a hundred Christmas presents,
•
ministering to hundreds of children in the villages through Vacation
Bible Schools and by simply playing together in the streets.
But,
beyond the numbers, we've experienced the love of God as He has made
Himself real to us in some of the most unlikely places. When we began
this journey five years ago, we were reading the book, "Crazy Love" by
Francis Chan, about how the God of the universe loves us with a radical,
unconditional, self-sacrificing love. He calls us to a passionate love
relationship with Him. We're learning that the answer to our
complacency, to our lack of passion, isn't keeping a list of do's and
don'ts, going through the motions of Christianity. It's falling in love
with the one and only God who loves us like the rain.
