Mark---July 2, 2014

I had the privilege today of delivering 6 stoves to the village where we were working. Last summer when we visited Copan I had the opportunity to tour a stove factory owned by one of our translator’s father. The factory produces stoves exclusively for Rotary projects. I took several pictures of the process and used them in a program for the local club last summer when I got home.  The Seminole Rotary Club has been planning a stove project for quite some time and decided a few months ago to begin the process. I contacted Eduardo and he gave me the contact information for the Stove Team in the United States. The local club mailed a check and the Stove Team wired the money to Copan. We agreed to let Mr. Murcia decide where the stoves would go since he knew the villages most in need. Eduardo told me his father had made a decision and would give us instructions when we arrived in Copan. In the meantime, Audrey Long was working on the Mission team’s schedule for the week. She had assigned villages for us to visit several months ago. I contacted Eduardo when we arrived in Copan and he came over to the Mission House to make plans for delivering the stoves. There are many villages around Copan and our mission project focuses on twelve of them. I was hoping that the stoves would be delivered somewhere near where we were already scheduled to be. We were all amazed when we realized that Mr. Murcia had chosen not only one of the twelve villages in our project, but one of the very villages we were scheduled to visit. He came by the house this morning before we left and agreed with us that only God could work something out so perfectly. He then shared that the village we would be working in today had a stove project earlier with 25 stoves sponsored by another Rotary Club. Just a few days after I contacted him about the Seminole Stove Project, the village leader contacted him and told him there were 6 more families in the village that were in need of a stove. He immediately knew that’s where our stoves would go. What he didn’t know was that Audrey Long had selected that same village for us to visit months earlier. Another “coincidence” is that the club had originally planned to sponsor 5 stoves instead of 6. An individual overheard us talking about the project and donated the 6^th stove just before the check was mailed.

Isaiah 55:8-9 ⁸ “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. ⁹ “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.