mustard seed

The following was in our community's weekly newsletter by David Smith.

You may not care at all what I felt while watching television on Sunday night. But, since no one else has a story to share this week, you're stuck with me and my love for Juarez.

Juarez?

Well, my love for what that word means to us at Northstar. To most of the world, that word means something else.

Drugs. Cartel. Crime. Beheading. Sand. Dirt. Hunger. Murder.

To us, it simply means ... mustard seed.

This past Sunday our friends, the Ruiz family (Pastor Jesus and Maria, and their children, Elizabeth and Jesus Jr.), were featured on Extreme Makeover Home Edition receiving their new home in El Paso. Due to their efforts to love the orphans and marginalized in Juarez, Mexico, (El Paso's twin city) they were never able to finish their home in El Paso. It's a home that they used mostly for storing donations given to their Juarez-based outreach, JEM Ministries.

And so as I watched the show, I couldn't help but recognize that the mustard seed was blooming. Not because they received a free house or that the exposure they'll receive will only aid us in finishing the JEM orphanage and trade school in Juarez.

And not even because they were just invited to The White House in June to speak to the political leaders of our country about their ministry.

The White House. Let that sink in.

The mustard seed is a seed of faith, not a seed of anything physical.

We didn't start our partnership with the Ruiz family and JEM Ministries with a mustard seed of faith. But we did continue with it. To the physical eye, there didn't seem to be much promise in believing this concept-empowering an El Paso family to radically transform a hurting Juarez community ... with just a left over piece of garbage dump land, a few wild ideas, and the determination of a family's faith.

It was just a tiny mustard seed when we planted it. And as I watched the show that night with 30 others, I realized that the blooming was the renewed faith we were all feeling. It was the inspiration that was igniting in our hearts ... the feeling that we could walk out those doors and take on the world ... climb any mountain ... repair any injustice.

Who knows ... God may decide to never fulfill the dreams we have for Juarez. But we'll always have our mustard seed. We'll always have that small seed that has done nothing but bloom into more joy, more fun, more fellowship ... and more faith.