“I can promise you a piece of land.  I can’t promise you a home, or electricity, or running water, but I can promise a piece of land for each of your families.  If you decide to say yes, are you willing to trust God with the rest?”

I was standing on a battered retaining wall in an urban park that had been destroyed by Hurricane Mitch just weeks before.  The hundreds of eyes looking back at me belonged to survivors who had lost their homes in that same storm.  The river that flowed just a hundred feet or so from this park is the same one that raged into their neighborhood on the night of October 31, 1998. It took everything they owned. 

One of the leaders of the community repeated the question to the nearly two hundred families standing there. “What do you think?  Do you want to go with Michael?”

With one voice, the survivors shouted, “¡Si, vamos!”  “Yes, we’ll go!”

From that one decision—choosing to believe that God had something greater in store for them—we began to see miracle after miracle.  The first day we took over the hilly acreage that was an extinct cow pasture, armed with hundreds of machetes to clear away the scrub, we all wondered if we were crazy to believe that this would one day be their new home.  But just owning that land, after so many people donated sacrificially to help them rebuild their lives, seemed like a promise that we couldn’t ignore.  So, we started chopping.

The community members took daily steps of obedience, arriving at the land every morning to prepare it for the homes that they may or may not ever have funds to build.  God provided.  He provided roads and electricity and water and sewage and yes, even homes.  He raised a beautiful community out of that scrubby cow pasture, one that they would decide to name after my mom:  Villa Linda Miller.  

In the years since Villa Linda Miller became a vibrant, flourishing village, the abuelas of the community—the grandmas—often come up to me to tell me that Hurricane Mitch was the best thing that ever happened to them.  God used the storm, they explain, to take them out of a squatter community at the edge of a polluted river to give them a literal city on a hill.

A year before addressing that crowd of hurricane survivors, I was finishing my fourth year as an elementary school teacher in Houston.  I had a great job, great friends—a nice, rewarding life.  But I had spent six months in Honduras as a senior in college in 1993 doing an internship with an organization that worked with street kids. God had planted a disquieting call in my heart that would not go away.  I resigned my teaching job in June and, on August 12, 1998, at the age of 26, I moved to Honduras.  Two months later, Hurricane Mitch became the second deadliest Atlantic hurricane on record.

In the midst of tragedy, I saw God move mountains.  I saw Him defend the cause of widows and orphans.  I literally saw Him take 165 families out of the miry pit and place them on high ground.  I saw God’s mighty care for His people with my own eyes.

You don’t witness miracles and remain unchanged.  With a sure sense of God’s active, guiding, loving hand, we founded the Micah Project, and we opened the doors of the Micah House in January, 2000. Our first motto was “Yesterday’s Street Children, Tomorrow’s Kingdom Builders.”  God would surely show His same almighty love to these kids that he showed to the families that built Villa Linda Miller! Right?

The short answer is yes.  Absolutely.  God moves powerfully in the lives of the kids who are part of the Micah Project, who once lived on the streets.  But it has taken me twenty-five years of ministry to understand that the way He chooses to do that is not at all in the ways that I had imagined when I first moved to Honduras.  

My understanding of how God moves was too linear.  God calls us to do something for Him, we obey, God moves mightily through us.  It’s strength-to-strength:  our all-powerful God makes us strong so that we can do strong things for Him.  That’s how I saw God work to create the Villa Linda Miller community and I assumed that He only worked that way.  But that assumption runs the risk of putting Him in a box and creating Him in our own image.

There is a dividing line in my time in Honduras, one that represents a “before” and “after” in my thinking about how God uses us.  And that line was created by Axel.

Axel had just turned twelve when he joined the Micah House in 2008.  He was already living on the streets, addicted to drugs, and had watched at least one person die a violent death at the hands of another.  That’s a lot for any kid to carry on his shoulders.

Axel spent some time in juvenile detention prior to joining Micah and one of their reports about him cautioned that he was aggressive and prone to violence.  There are some kids you just automatically connect with, though, and I found Axel to be kind and empathetic, with a dry sense of humor and goofy grin.   If there is one quality that makes Micah unique, it is our ability to see the best in kids who have only ever been defined by their defects.

In 2010, Axel left Micah and went back to the streets.  One afternoon a few weeks later, I decided to walk to Tegucigalpa’s sprawling outdoor market district to look for him.  I just couldn’t accept that after so much growth at Micah, he would give it all up again and resume his life on the streets.  Finding someone who doesn’t want to be found in that chaotic sector of the city is a true needle-in-a-haystack endeavor.  I walked into the seedy part of the market district where the shoe cobblers work—and where some of them sell shoe glue to street kids as their drug of choice.  As I stood there, watching hundreds of people flow back and forth, I prayed over and over again:  “Lord, bring Axel down this street.”

Sure enough, after about an hour I saw Axel turn the corner and head in my direction.  When he saw me, he stopped dead in his tracks.  We greeted each other with an awkward hug, and I could sense the palpable shame he felt for having crashed out of Micah.  The main reason I went to find him, though, was not to shame him into returning to Micah, but to show him how much we loved him, no matter what he was going through. I was hoping that our love would break through the cycle of shame and despair that street kids get trapped in.  Even if that meant spending an afternoon in the market district just to give him a hug.

(To see a video of Axel giving a tour of the market area, follow this link:  https://vimeo.com/829585489?share=copy ).

Axel did come back to Micah for a time. But he struggled and, in 2012, he left back to the streets once again.  We did not give up on him, but, as the years went by, we saw him less and less.  In early March of 2015, I got a call I was not prepared for.  Axel had been gunned down in that same market area where I had encountered him that day.  The next 24 hours were an out-of-body blur:  retrieving Axel’s body from the morgue, setting up the all-night wake, consoling his brothers and friends, and struggling to find words of hope as I preached at his graveside the following day.

It took some time for that numbness to wear off and for the reality of loss to set in.  Traumatic grief is a jumbled mix of sadness, anger, helplessness, doubt, regret, and fear.  In the midst of those contrary emotions, I had one intrusive thought that I couldn’t shake:   I did not come to Honduras to bury kids I love.  What happened to the all-powerful God who moved heaven and earth for the people of Villa Linda Miller?  Why did He not do the same for Axel?  Why was my love and strength not enough to save this kid who had known so much suffering?

Axel’s death was only the first of many.  The following year, In 2016, Marvincito and Charlie died just three days apart.  A few months after that, in early 2017, 14-year-old Jeferson lost his life as well.  In 2020, Elvin was killed.  That’s too much loss.  In our photo albums, we have thousands of photos of each of these fallen boys. We see smiles as they celebrate birthdays and graduations, play soccer, have fun outings in parks and on beaches, and generally enjoy doing things that boys are supposed to do.  All the smiles in those photos have been blurred by grief.  Their deaths are hard to accept.   

How do we move forward after such devastating loss?  How do we continue to love and serve the boys in our homes while dealing with a broken heart?  There is a temptation to just stay numb and do this ministry like robots, shielding our hearts from more pain.  It is easy to go into survivor mode, just trying to get through each day while desperately hoping that no more tragedy strikes.  

 But in these moments of deepest grief, God revealed His Father-heart to us.  He showed us that, while He is a God who reveals Himself through mighty deeds, He also shows His love by dwelling with the brokenhearted in their brokenness.  Yes, our God split the Red Sea in two to save His people from slavery.  But he also broke down and wept at the tomb of His friend Lazarus.  Is it possible that God wants to use our broken heart as much—or more—than He uses our strength to draw others to Himself?

In his groundbreaking book Tattoos on the Heart, Father Greg Boyle writes,  “Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded.  It’s a covenant between equals” (Tattoos, 77).    When we connect to these kids through a broken heart, we are more clearly reflecting our Father’s heart to them.  We realize that, in our service to them, we are not looking down at them from above; rather, we are engaged with them eye-to-eye, heart-to-heart.  We are the same.  Our brokenness connects with their brokenness, and somehow, God uses that to move both of us closer to wholeness.  That sounds crazy, but isn’t that the power of the cross?  A God who healed a broken world by choosing to become broken Himself?

Every day at Micah is a mix of joy and sorrow.  We see guys achieving goals and celebrating successes who eat dinner every night next to guys who are one tiny jostle of the tightrope away from crashing back down into a dark pit.  That’s just the reality of working with this population.  Engaging them with a broken heart has made me better at what I do.  It helps me to love more deeply and to hope more fearlessly.  Even those moments of joy and triumph are made sweeter by a broken heart.  It reminds us how precious life is and how each sweet moment with these guys is a gift from the Lord.

In the end, Axel’s younger brother Julio reminded me of what is most important. I have written about Julio extensively since he died in a traffic accident last January (read that update here: https://bit.ly/MicahStopGivingUp ).  His loss was made even more devastating by the knowledge of how far he had come; despite his own struggles, he was a daily, inspiring light to our community, even at the age of 21.  The night before his accident, he knocked on the door of my cabin at Micah to give me his newest painting.  It was a colorful rendering of Psalm 27:  “The Lord is my light and my salvation.  Whom shall I fear?”  Six hours later, he was gone.

We are still in the process of grieving Julio’s death, but Julio and his painting reminded us that having a broken heart is not an end unto itself.  The brokenness has a purpose and a direction.  God’s broken heart bought us new and everlasting life at an agonizing price; our broken heart reminds us to keep our gaze directed at that beautiful truth.  

When I moved to Honduras in my twenties, I was able to see God provide 165 homes to hurricane survivors in a miraculous way.  One day, He will recreate that miracle on a grand scale.  He will raise us up from the dead into a new and eternal home.  We will live side-by-side with Axel, Charlie, Marvincito, Jeferson, Elvin, and Julio in a place that will be so searingly beautiful that it will need no sun.  It will be lit by His glory.  A place where “there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away” (Revelation 21: 4b).

I am grateful for my broken heart.  It sounds strange to admit, but it’s true.  It is my most cherished gift after 25 years of ministry in Honduras.  It reminds me every day to wait with eager expectation for RESURRECTION. It reminds me to love the kids that God brings into the Micah Project in their entirety, even their broken parts.  It reminds me that God did not choose me because of any strength I might have, but because He loves me enough to remind me that His strength is perfect in my weakness.

I am also grateful for my many co-laborers over the years who have had their hearts broken as well.  This has not been a lonely journey, but rather one filled with faithful brothers and sisters who have reminded me when the pain becomes too overwhelming that our brokenness is not in vain.

I am grateful for each one of you who continues to believe that God is completing His perfect will through the ministry of the Micah Project, even when His victories seem like defeats in the world’s eyes.  Thank you for lifting our arms up in prayer and for keeping us pointed towards eternity.

Thank you for allowing us to discover how God uses broken and battered hearts to draw his lost sheep back to His heart—his perfect, loving, broken heart.

Your broken-hearted brother in Christ,

Michael Miller

“I lift up my eyes to the hills. From where does my help come? My help comes from the LORD, who made heaven and earth” (Psalm 121).

Our God wants us to fix our eyes on Him, but there is so much in this world that draws our gaze downward.  One of those things is shame.  Shame lies to us.  It tells us that our worth, or lack thereof, is tied up in things we have done—or things that have been done to us—in the past.  For our young men who spent time on the streets, shame is something they have to deal with as they pursue freedom through the Micah Project.  

You would think that shame would be a motivator to keep moving forward and to avoid the things that scarred us so badly in the past.  But often, shame has the opposite effect.  It convinces us that we are not worthy of the love that our Heavenly Father so graciously lavishes on us.  More often than not, shame drives us back into the arms of those things that kept us in chains.

There is a scene from my favorite show, The Chosen, in which Jesus is comforting Mary Magdalene.  She is wracked with the shame of her past and with the fact that the trauma of her past tricked her into thinking that she was not worthy of her Savior’s love.  Jesus wraps her in His arms and says two simple words to her:  “look up.”  At first her shame keeps her from doing so, but she finally looks up into His face.  What she finds there is not condemnation over past sin, but perfect love.

I have had countless conversations with young men who feel that the streets are all they deserve.  Even this past week, I hugged a kid who had left Micah for the 15^th (20^th?) time to go back to the streets.  Shame keeps him there, keeps him from seeing a love that went all the way to the cross to save him.  So we don’t heap more shame on him for having crashed and burned again.  We put our arms around him and tell him, “look up.” 

I have a mug from The Chosen that has those two simple words on it.  “Look up”.  I see those words every time I take a sip of my morning coffee.  Here at Micah, we deal with a world full of shame.  But my morning routine reminds me that our task is to help our kids to look up.  To look into the face of the One who loves them and who frees them from the bondage of shame.  John’s gospel reminds us that, if the Son sets us free, we are free indeed.

When I took this picture with Axel in a park near Tegucigalpa last week, there was something so familiar about it. Finally, it dawned on me and I went hunting for another picture, taken ten years earlier. When I placed them side-by-side, the parallels came painfully in to focus. Both are thirteen-year-old boys named Axel, and both had been in Micah just a couple of months when each picture was taken. Both have brought a lot of love into our lives, despite the jagged edges of their personalities created by violence, tragedy and loss.

One of these Axels sat next to me in the van on the way to church today, fidgeting with the radio dial and chatting about music, about soccer, about his bike. Though his first months at Micah have been terribly hard, he is a beautiful, funny kid who brings a smile to our hearts every day.

The Axel in the older pictures is just as much a part of my life as the one sitting next to me in the van, although he is no longer with us. Today is the third anniversary of his death, but his presence in my life is so palpable that he could just as easily be sitting next to me as is his young namesake. Both his life and his death changed me and changed Micah in a thousand different ways, and as I look at his picture, I realize that my life is fuller and so much richer because he is a part of it.

When I study these two pictures side-by-side, I realize that there is one other big difference, and that is in the man who is doing the hugging. The older picture shows a man who wanted to change the world using his own strength and his own smarts. When he had to say good-bye to Axel on March 18, 2015, all of that silliness went away forever. Now, he is a man who whose greatest tool for reaching these kids is a broken heart.

In his book, “Barking to the Choir,” Father Greg Boyle says, “standing at the margins with the broken reminds us not of our own superiority but of our own brokenness.” And that reminder is not a bad thing; I am convinced that reaching out to others with a broken heart brings us much closer to the Father-heart of God for lost and the wounded. This broken heart loves more deeply, shows more mercy, and sees the broken people of this world through the eyes of kinship and understanding rather than through the opinion that I, with all of my education and experience, have something to give to them.

That is the greatest gift that our first Axel gave to me. I wish he could be here so that I could explain that to him! I’m sure he’d just smile his goofy grin and playfully punch me on the shoulder as his response. Thankfully, I’ll have an eternity to try to convince him how much he means to me. In the meantime, our new Axel is probably wondering why he’s getting so many prolonged, extra-tight hugs on this hard day. Thankfully, miraculously, he’s getting as good at giving those hugs as he is at receiving them. He doesn’t realize that each tight squeeze I give him is doing double duty, showing love to him and also to the Axel in that other picture, now ten years old.

Michael Miller

Note: I wrote this reflection on March 18, 2018, three years after Axel Lopez passed away. I am re-publishing it on March 18, 2021.

[Note: I wrote this reflection in October, 2017 but decided not to publish it at that time.  It is painful, and, in parts, angry and even hopeless.  I have learned since, though, that those deep, dark cries of the soul are vital in our journey from mourning to broken healing.  God is not afraid of them.  So I present to you an honest, vulnerable snapshot of grief.  Jumbled as it is, I pray that it paints a picture of a God whose love is big enough to receive it and transform it.]

Ask Me about Sorority Life:

A Confused Chronology of Death and Life

My relationship with Wilfredo is really just a series of snapshots taken over the last two years. Snapshots taken on the streets of Tegucigalpa, or in the brief times that he was living in the Isaiah House. Though I did not know him well, these pictures began to piece together a mosaic of his character. They show a kid with a with an easy-going smile, an open and friendly face, a young man who gives and receives hugs easily. 

There is a picture from last November when Micah’s staff and the young men from our three homes were on a retreat in the mountains east of Tegucigalpa.

It was Wilfredo’s birthday, and we brought him up to the stage after one of our worship sessions in order to celebrate his nineteen years. Sixty-plus people singing to Wilfredo: what must he have been thinking? A kid who grew up on the streets, being loudly serenaded by so many? Our leaders laid hands on him and prayed over him, asking his Father to bless his life. 

Wilfredo responded to being celebrated with words of hope; promising us that he wanted to leave street life and addiction behind, that he wanted to study and have a career and a family. He wanted to tough it out in the Isaiah House in order to leave the streets behind for good. 

O Lord, you are my God; I will exalt you; I will praise your name, for you have done wonderful things, plans formed of old, faithful and sure… (Isaiah 25:1) 

The next snapshot, though, seems misplaced and out of order. I run into Wilfredo in one of the plazas in the downtown area of Tegucigalpa. He is back on the streets, his burst of hope and willpower drowned out by all of the things that keep kids on the streets: addiction, low self-esteem, complex trauma, even the fear of how exposed and raw his heart could become if he truly were to go through a process of healing and restoration at the Isaiah house. He still greets me with a genuine smile and a warm hug, but what’s different about this snapshot is his eyes. They have gone back into survival mode; they dart from point-to-point, taking in our surroundings as we talk. He promises me that he will go to the Isaiah House to talk to the caregivers there about giving him another chance (will this be the third or fourth? I don’t remember…). We talk for a few more minutes, but he is distracted and is soon off on some mission, which, whether innocent or dangerous, is surely tied in with that very survival that his eyes were searching for. 

…For you have been a stronghold to the poor, a stronghold to the needy in his distress, a shelter from the storm and a shade from the heat…(Isaiah 25:4) 

There are other snapshots of my brief times with Wilfredo, but they continue to be jumbled and strangely unchronological. He is in the Isaiah House having lunch with the rest of the guys. He is huddled asleep on the street corner with a large group of kids. He is at Micah on a Sunday night for a combined time of worship with all three houses. He is back in that same plaza where I ran into him…when was that? Weeks ago? Or have months already passed? There is no forward movement in his life, only cycles of hope and despair that always seem to bring him back to the same point. 

…On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined… (Isaiah 25:6) 

Except for the last snapshot I have of him. That one is brutally chronological. I am standing over Wilfredo’s casket, looking at his face, which has been damaged beyond recognition by the three bullets that ended his life last week. There is no longer an easy-going smile; no longer are there eyes trained on survival. The forces of destruction in this world, whether they reign over streets, over families, over governments, or over international commerce, were more powerful than Wilfredo’s survival instincts. He will not see his 20th birthday next month and there will be no more snapshots. 

And he will swallow up on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death forever; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken. (Isaiah 25:7-8) 

Since 2015, we have buried too many kids. Axel, Marvincito, Charlie, Edgar, Jeferson, Rony, and now Wilfredo. I don’t know what to do with that anymore. I don’t know how it fits into the ebb and flow of the Micah Project’s story, or my own, for that matter. The narratives of our lives are supposed to have forward movement: high school, college, career, marriage, kids, grandkids, retirement…it is a storyline that has direction and purpose. But I have 46,853 pictures on my computer that tell the story of Micah that are now too hard for me to look through. I see Axel clinging to me piggy-back as I run down a beach, and a picture of me teaching Jeferson how to swing a bat at a baseball. There is Charlie, narrating a video tour of the Micah House, and Marvincito, asleep on my shoulder during a long bus ride. And there we are celebrating Rony’s first year of being clean and sober, and once again, there’s that picture of us laying our hands on Wilfredo last November, asking the Lord to intervene in his life. 

But those pictures are all jumbled now. For they are happy moments, hope-filled scenes of guys making the right decisions to move their lives forward. But when I look at them now, all those pictures are tattered, faded and tear-stained due to tragic endings–lives snuffed out way too soon. The stories those pictures tell no longer make any sense. 

It will be said on that day, “Behold, this is our God; we have waited for him, that he might save us. This is the Lord; we have waited for him…(Isaiah 25:9) 

At Wilfredo’s funeral, I begin to get scared about the narrative flow of my own soul. Try as I might, I can’t convince my brain to grant me access to my emotions. With each senseless funeral, the survival part of my brain seems to be building a wall around my heart, knowing that yet another death might just be the thing that destroys me. Is anybody reading this a student of the human psyche? Then answer me this: what is the maximum amount of kids that a person can bury before it buries him? Any doctoral dissertations out there that can give me a number? I see my staff slowly being torn apart by each funeral, and I wonder if, as individuals, we each have a point where the next funeral will do us in. You’ve buried seven kids? Sorry, Michael! You’ve reached your limit for one lifetime. Game over! Thanks for playing! 

So I stand by Wilfredo’s bullet-ridden corpse, but I feel disembodied. I am going through the motions, consoling people, making all the logistical arrangements, saying the words that people want to hear from their leader. But it as if I am floating above this whole scene, making my body move marionette-like, making my lips say the right things with all the skill of a ventriloquist. I am asked if I am going to give my funeral sermon: I’ve got it memorized, after all. Though I have given it six other times in the last couple of years, no words come as I stand by Wilfredo’s casket. One of my main jobs is to bring meaning to senseless tragedy, but this time, there is only a buzzing silence in my heart. 

…let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation. For the hand of the Lord will rest on this mountain…(Isaiah 25:9-10) 

People are looking at me, expecting me to be the mourner-in-chief, again. There are at least twenty street kids in the funeral home. After a while, they start coming up to me, one-by-one, saying they are hungry, or thirsty, or need a pair of shoes. I smile at them, but have nothing to give them. I have nothing for any of them. How was I ever so prideful to think that I had anything to offer this broken group of kids? I walk out of the funeral home and go to the street corner, ostensibly to wait for the bus that will take us to the cemetery. But really, it is to get away from the street kids’ broken neediness, from Wilfredo’s broken body, from my own broken spirit. 

And he will spread out his hands in the midst of it as a swimmer spreads his hands out to swim, but the Lord will lay low his pompous pride together with the skill of his hands. And the high fortifications of his walls he will bring down, lay low, and cast to the ground, to the dust. (Isaiah 25:11-12). 

The bus finally comes, and we all follow Wilfredo’s body out of the city and to the cemetery. The hole is dug when we get there, and we stand around the grave silently as Wilfredo’s two sisters wail and moan and writhe on the ground in front of Wilfredo’s casket. I start to panic again, thinking that I am the one that is going to have to do the “dust to dust” speech as the body goes into the ground. But thankfully, there are a couple of ladies from the church where the Isaiah House residents attend, and they do an admirable job reading the right funeral verses. 

As Wilfredo’s casket is lowered into the ground, there is a street girl named Benellamin standing at the edge of the grave. She is one of the saddest people I have ever met. At nineteen, she has already been a glue-user for so long that it is affecting her mental capacities. She has lived on a street corner in downtown Tegucigalpa for years, and a few months ago, she had a baby on that corner. Several Micah staff members fought to get her the help she needs in order to be able to keep custody of her baby, but she seems to be beyond fighting for herself. In the end, we helped her place the baby with a cousin of hers until we can find an orphanage that will accept it. 

Benellamin continues to stand there by the side of the grave, huffing from her glue bottle when she thinks no one is looking. Her shoulders are permanently stooped, and she is wearing someone’s old hand-me-down shirt, that has written in big blue letters on the back, “Ask me about sorority life”. And after this whole tragic day, this image is what does me in. I imagine the original owner of this shirt bubbling on about the life-long friendships formed in sororities, about shared hopes and dreams, and serving others together, about the carefree fun of being a young college student. The shirt in the picture is the opposite of anything Benellamin has ever experienced, and it makes a mockery of all of the injustice, degradation and evil that has been heaped on this girl her whole life. 

Benellamin picks up a fistful of dirt to throw on top of Wilfredo’s casket. It is the last picture that I have of him, and maybe the most honest picture of a life doomed to misfortune. With lots of helpers, the casket quickly disappears underneath the muddy dirt, and the burial is finished. We all stand around looking at each other, not quite knowing how to end things. After a bit, we quietly head back to the entrance to the cemetery. We say goodbye to the street kids, who will take the bus back downtown; we will take a separate car back to the Micah Project in the opposite direction. Benellamin asks me for money to buy some food downtown, but I cannot give her any. She will most certainly use it to buy a fresh bottle of glue. She gives me a hug anyway and gets on to the bus, back to the streets where she will resume her death-filled life. 

O Lord, you are my God; I will exalt you; I will praise your name, for you have done wonderful things, plans formed of old, faithful and sure. (Isaiah 25:1) 

Michael Miller 

October 12, 2017 

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Post-script: This author believes in the unchanging goodness of God and his pure and perfect love for his children, even if he does not always understand how that operates in the daily reality of life—and death–on the streets. He also believes in a God whose love is big enough to listen to our deepest, hardest questions about life in this broken world. And he is very thankful, over the last nineteen years, for the kids who have left the streets behind forever thanks to what God has done through the Micah Project. 

When Axel began to get pulled back to the streets after almost three years in the Micah House, he ended up running the streets in Tegucigalpa’s sprawling outdoor market district, which covers nearly ten square blocks of the city.   He knew every corner, every alleyway, and every twist and turn of the labyrinth that is this chaotic, jumbled part of town.  When he lived at Micah, he would sometimes take us to visit the outdoor market, and after about five turns down narrow pathways filled with makeshift market stalls, we would be so lost that we would be completely dependent on Axel to find our way out.  He would give us a backwards glance to make sure we were still following him, and, with his impish, lopsided grin, he would plow forward past endless stalls selling everything under the sun.

In 2011, at the age of 15, when he had been back on the streets for several weeks, I decided to go down to the market district myself to look for him.  Talk about looking for a needle in a haystack; with thousands of merchants selling to thousands of buyers, you could walk for hours without passing the same face.  Eventually, I ended up at a corner where the shoe cobblers all have stands; I figured it would be a good place to wait for Axel because it is where the street kids come to by the shoe glue they inhale as their drug of choice.

“Heavenly Father, move Axel in this direction; have him pass by this corner.” I prayed that over and over again, knowing that the only way for me to find Axel in this place was through divine intervention.  Those prayers were always driven by hope, although tinged with desperation and sadness. But as long as I might be able to find Axel, I would not lose hope that he might once again choose to leave the streets behind.

Sure enough, after about thirty minutes on that corner, Axel appeared.  When he saw me, he froze in surprise.  “Hey Mike, what are you doing here?” he asked, giving me a hug.  I told him that I had been anxious to see him and wanted to talk with him.  He invited me to walk him to his mom’s motel room in the even-seedier district of town adjacent to the market:  the red-light district.  As we turned on to the block where his mom lived, we passed dozens of men sprawled all over the sidewalks, drunk or stoned to the point of unconsciousness. Axel took me into the door of a dilapidated building, up a flight of stairs and down a pitch-black hallway that had no working lights.  Finally, he opened the door to the room that his mom paid for week-to-week, when she could.

His mom wasn’t home, but we entered the small room.  Out of his pocket he pulled out a small bag of dog food he had bought for Sasha, his beloved, fluffy little dog.  There was a makeshift curtain pulled across the bed to give it a little privacy, but he opened it up and invited me to sit down on it, since there was nowhere else to sit in the suffocating space.  He said he only had a few minutes; he had come to re-pack his backpack with a few worn pieces of clothes that his mom had washed for him in the sink.  As he packed, I spoke words of hope and love to him, telling him how important he was to me, how smart and compassionate he was, and how much we wanted to see him become the man that God had created him to be.  Axel listened–he was always polite and thoughtful—but on this day, he seemed distracted.  After he packed his backpack, he splashed some water on his face and told me that we needed to head out.  He walked me back to the boundary between the red-light district and the market district, gave me a hug, and headed off.

A few weeks later, Axel did rejoin the Micah Project, and we helped to place him in a six-month drug rehabilitation program.  He made it for a while, but unfortunately, he ended up on the streets again in 2013. Though it seemed like running the streets was going to be his destiny at that point, we never gave up hope for him. He had always been such an empathetic, big-hearted kid; surely, he wouldn’t end up on the streets the rest of his life?

On March 18, 2015, we were hosting a youth group from my home church in St. Louis. It was a hot, dusty day, and after several hours of building a section of perimeter wall on Micah’s property, I decided to go into my cabin on our property for a few minutes to cool off.  I received a phone call, though, while sitting there in front of my fan:  they had found Axel’s body earlier that morning, shot to death in one of those same market alleyways that he used to run so happily.

I would eventually go pick up Axel’s mom and drive to the morgue with her to identify and claim his body, but in the few minutes I had there in my cabin, it was as if my mind and heart had become unmoored from my body.  I’m not sure how much time passed by, but, when I came to, I was at my bedroom window, staring out at the distant mountains, weeping.  After fifteen years of ministry to street kids, this would be the first time I would every have to say good-bye forever.

And how was I supposed to do that?  In all those years, I had developed a robust vocabulary of hope—of God’s unending love and mercy. It was the vocabulary of “it’s never too late because God will always give you another opportunity.”  But now, I had to develop a whole new vocabulary: the language of lament.

Though today is the fourth anniversary of Axel’s death, I’m still trying to figure out what lament looks like.  I suppose that lament begins by going deep down into the depths of my soul, to the part of me that was changed forever by Axel’s death, and by crying out to God from that space.  But that space in my heart can be a scary place to visit; after Axel’s death, there is sorrow there, but dig a little deeper, and you also find anger, and bitterness, and revenge, and hopelessness.  It is not a place I like to visit often.  And what happens to my faith when, upon visiting that place, I end up shaking my fist at God and blaming him for Axel’s death?

The beautiful thing about lament, though, is that God invites us into that place; in fact, He expects us to go there.  He is not scared of the fist-shaking, for He knows that it is part of our healing journey.  We might be scared about what we will find out about ourselves if we abandon all facades and walk into that place with complete honesty and vulnerability.  But then we hear our Savior, at his moment of utter desolation, say, “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  If our sinless Savior can go to that place of utter desolation, surely, he beckons us to follow Him there as well!

My journey through lament has been an uneven one.  Some days, I will go to that deep place and truly lament Axel’s loss. At other times, it is just too hard, and I can go for weeks at a time without visiting that place again.  Some days, my heart has words to process his loss, while on others, the Spirit has to accept my groaning too deep for words.

On the days in which I do feel the need for lament, I am learning not to fear that deep, dark, desolate place.  Every once in a while, I will play a song from the Broadway show Les Miserables, titled “Bring Him Home,” which serves as a gateway to that place of lament. Though, in the show, Jean Valjean sings this song as young Marius goes off to fight on the barricades, I always sing it to my fallen Axel:

God on high
Hear my prayer
In my need
You have always been there

He is young
He’s afraid
Let him rest
Heaven blessed.
Bring him home.

He’s like the son I might have known
If God had granted me a son.
The summers die
One by one
How soon they fly
On and on
And I am old
And will be gone.

Bring him peace
Bring him joy
He is young
He is only a boy

You can take
You can give
Let him be
Let him live
If I die, let me die
Let him live
Bring him home.

As the years have gone by, I have been able to go deeper and deeper into that place of sorrow and lament. It’s not that it has become easier to reside there, it’s just that the pain that I experience there has become more familiar; it has a vocabulary attached to it now.  In that place, I can say, freely, “Everything is not all right. It is wrong that Axel died before reaching manhood.  How long, Lord, how long, will the world be like this?  How long will we have to cry for kids who were born doomed to misfortune?”

I am discovering, too, that God meets me in that place of despair.  He doesn’t come in a “happily-ever-after” way; often, when he meets me there, his silence matches my own lack of words.  He doesn’t bring me any answers to all of my “why” questions, and yet, over time, his quiet presence there is enough.

In that, I am learning that the vocabulary of hope is not diametrically opposed to the vocabulary of lament.  Lament is hope, in the sense that it gives us a way to confront the evil, the brokenness, the injustice of this dying world.  Then, it points us to a promise:  that this world is not our home.  It says that, when I sing “Bring him Home” to Axel, that home is not here; it is a better place, one in which he can live into the fullness of who he was created to be, in a world in which He will someday make all things new.

Lament is hopeful.  That sounds crazy, but it is.  That does not mean that you have to force yourself into a happy mindset, it just means that, slowly, and usually imperceptibly, God buds tiny seeds of hope into the dark soil of sadness.  You can’t speed up that process; it happens as your soul aches, questions, cries out, and eventually, begins to heal.

Today, four years after Axel’s death, I do see those sprigs of hope peeking up. They are so tiny as to almost be invisible, but they are there.  In order for that hope to grow, God calls me to keep ploughing deeply into the fertile soil of lament.  He challenges me to not accept shallow answers, and to not let the deep hurt of losing Axel get lost in the frenetic pace of everyday life.  He promises me that, if I continue to walk in those deep, shadow-places of loss, he will always meet me there.  And he whispers to me there that some day, in a far better place, Axel will meet me there as well.

In hope-filled lament,

Michael Miller

Resources:

1. In 2016, for the first anniversary of Axel’s death, our boys produced this video in his memory, called Recuerdos: A Modern Psalm of Lament.  In it, there is footage of our beloved Axel walking through his beloved marketplace:  https://vimeo.com/159499493
2. Aaron Niequist has recently produced a prayer of lament for his series, A New Liturgy. It is a powerful tool for those needing to walk into those deep shadowlands of lament: https://store.anewliturgy.com/album/no-7-lament-free-download
3. “Bring him Home” from Les Miserables. Sung by Josh Groban: https://youtu.be/fXnRf3TQcpk

 “Hola.  My name is Miguel, and I’m not a believer.” 

Hearing these words, I start to sweat.  Miguel and I have spent the last twenty-four hours hopscotching from Tegucigalpa to Panama to São Paulo and finally, to Curitiba, Brazil. Tomorrow, he’s supposed to start six months of intense Bible classes and missions training on a Youth with a Mission base far from home.  His journey will not be an easy one.

We have taken his new roommates to lunch, and although our conversation is a messy mix of Portuguese and Spanish, they clearly understand his meaning.

 “If you don’t believe, then why are you here?” one of them asks.

“Well, I’ve always wanted to come to Brazil and learn Portuguese,” Miguel nonchalantly responds.  Sighing, I think to myself, “Oh Miguel, the next six months are really going to be long.”

In reality, though, Miguel’s declaration isn’t shocking. When we first met on the streets in 2010, he was twelve years old and already huffing glue and using the fumes to cloud out a lifetime of pain. And after he had lived for only three months at the Micah House, the home we run for street kids in Tegucigalpa,  his mom passed away from cancer that had been diagnosed just weeks before her death. What does a kid do with so much loss?

Becca Bell, my colleague, was Miguel’s hero during that time. She stayed by his side during his mom’s funeral and in the months ahead as Miguel came to terms with overwhelming grief as well as rid his young body and brain of dependency on yellow glue.  Surrounded by love, Miguel began to blossom, and we celebrated when he accepted Jesus Christ as his Savior and was baptized in October 2010.

One of the foundational truths of the Micah Project, though, is that our boys’ healing journeys rarely travel forward in a straight line.  Often, when the boys become young adults, they have to re-process all of the trauma and loss they experienced in their childhoods, this time from a more mature perspective.  During Miguel’s senior year in high school, dark clouds gathered over his life once again. In January, one of our younger boys, Jefferson, whom Miguel dearly loved, was shot and killed—he was only fourteen.  The intense grief of losing Jefferson ripped open the still-healing scars of his mom’s death and drove Miguel back into depression, despair, and doubt.  He fell into such a low place that we worried about whether he would ever be able to emerge on the other side.

Amazingly, Miguel pushed through his last year of high school, and with lots of encouragement from Becca, signed up for the six months in Brazil.  Three weeks into his Youth with a Mission classes, however, I got a call.

   “Michael, you have to buy me a ticket to come home. This just isn’t for me.  I don’t belong here.”

“Miguel, you need to hang on. It’s always tough in a new place, especially one with a different language.”

Two weeks later, I received a very different message: “Michael, it’s amazing to see all that God is doing here!  He is truly changing lives!”  For the first time in a long time, Miguel is allowing God into some of the most damaged areas of his heart.  And, as he opens up those broken spaces, he doesn’t encounter criticism or judgment; what he finds is love.

A week later, Miguel writes: “Michael, I’ve been able to forgive so many of the hurts from my past while I’ve been here. God is so faithful.”

And a couple of weeks after that: “Michael, I’m seeing the power of prayer like I’ve never experienced it before.  Wow!  God’s love for me is SO amazing!”

What we thought was impossible, our Father was doing before our eyes.  Where despair had reigned, peace now resided; confident joy quietly replaced deep sadness.

Near the end of his time in Brazil, Miguel wrote Becca and invited her to his graduation ceremony.  Most of the Youth with a Mission students would have family present, and Miguel wanted Becca to be there. What better person to celebrate what God had done in his life than the one who had loved him unconditionally in his hardest moments! But this wouldn’t be easy since Becca was on an overseas trip with her family and would only return home, which was now in Atlanta, hours before she needed to leave for São Paulo.  But thanks to a dear friend who gave her a free United Airlines standby ticket to São Paulo, Becca was determined to attend Miguel’s graduation!

That wasn’t going to be such an easy journey, however . . .

Bleary-eyed after an overnight flight with their two squirmy preschoolers, Becca quickly re-packs her suitcase and heads back to the airport.  The problem when you fly standby, however, is that there must be an available seat on the plane.  Becca’s flight to São Paulo is full.

She texts Miguel and me the bad news.  Miguel responds: “Don’t worry about your trip! I have been praying and the Lord has told me that you will be here for my graduation!  I’ll see you soon!” 

Though I’m in Honduras and Becca is in the Atlanta airport, we send him the same message: “Miguel, there aren’t any seats on the plane. Can’t get there on time.”

Miguel writes again: “You don’t have to worry!  My friends here at Youth with a Mission and I have prayed, and God has said that you will be here for my graduation!”

Becca runs across the airport to the Delta terminal to see if she can buy a seat to Houston or Chicago and fly standby with United from there. But the flight to Chicago is canceled and the one to Houston is full.  Desperately searching online while standing at the gate, Becca sees that Delta has a direct flight leaving Atlanta for São Paulo in less than an hour with plenty of open seats, but an economy fare for the one-way flight is currently $3800.  She mentions this flight to the gate agent, while admitting that as much as she wants to attend this graduation, that price was way out of her budget.

I text Miguel: “We love you. We’re so proud of you. But Becca can’t get a flight and won’t be there.”

He writes back: “I know you’re worried, but you don’t have to be. God has told me that she will be here!” Reading his text, I wonder what this disappointment will do to his newly renewed faith.

As Becca turns to leave, the Delta gate agent says, “Ma’am, hold on for just a second.”  She starts typing on her computer terminal.

Finally, she looks up.  “You know, they give us airline employees several buddy passes every year, and I never use them all.  So write down your information for me here, and I’ll give you one of my passes for the flight to São Paulo. You need to hurry though; the flight is already boarding.”

Shocked beyond words, Becca grabs her carry-on, sprints down the terminal and is one of the last passengers to board the Delta flight to São Paulo.  She is even more surprised when she is ushered to a first-class seat, a fancy one that has its own little booth and folds into a bed. Although there was no humanly possible way to get there, Becca is on her way to Brazil. And she will be well-rested when she arrives!

When Miguel calls me with the news, I am standing outside a restaurant in Tegucigalpa where I have just finished dinner with friends. “Michael, Becca is on a flight to São Paulo!  Someone gave her another free ticket!” I start to weep. God has done the impossible. Why did I ever think otherwise?

Becca arrives at Miguel’s graduation an hour before the ceremony begins.  It is a joyful, Spirit-filled celebration of God’s incredible faithfulness to his children. And Becca is there to cheer on Miguel and to celebrate the man he has become.

As I started to write this piece, I told Miguel that I was going to tell the story about Becca’s miraculous flight to Brazil.  He is back in Honduras now and investing time in our younger boys before he starts college in January. This is what he wrote to me: “Becca’s story reminds me that, as human beings, our way of living our lives and our view of God are just too small. He loves doing the impossible in our eyes.”

Though I have been a missionary for twenty years, sometimes I still forget that “with man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible” (Matthew 19:26).  Thanks, Miguel, for reminding me!  Miguel’s Heavenly Father transformed a broken, lost, addicted street kid into a man of deep, abiding faith.  He even used an anonymous Delta employee in Atlanta to show Miguel that with God, all things really are possible.

Michael Miller

http://www.micahprojecthonduras.org

I still can’t believe this painting is hanging in the living room of my cabin at the Micah Project.  I had admired it for over two years every time I visited the studio of talented Honduran painter, Denis Berrios.  Apparently, I was dropping pretty major hints, because some friends banded together in August and bought this beautiful piece to help me celebrate my 20^thanniversary in Honduras.

I ditched my TV to make room for this three-by-three-foot masterpiece.  There is something about this painting that perfectly captures the beauty and the chaos of Tegucigalpa, the city I have loved and called home for almost half my life.  The brushstrokes that created it pulsate with life. If it were possible to turn the volume up on this painting, you would hear children shouting and laughing while chasing a soccer ball down one of these hillside alleys; you would hear roosters crowing, dogs barking, and every block would have its own self-appointed DJ, some kid blasting the beat of the Latin street, reggaetón, from his family’s stereo, the nicest thing they own.

This place clings to a hillside for dear life, teetering on a razor’s edge of survival.  But how resilient its people are!  So many Hondurans I know are creative, tough, optimistic, persevering people who have figured out how to make it despite never knowing exactly how they will scrape up enough money to survive through the end of the week. They are poor, but they always find a way–to use a favorite Honduran phrase–to salir adelante:  to keep pushing life forward.

That is, until they don’t.  It is easy to sentimentalize poverty, especially for those of us who don’t have to navigate its too-narrow and often-blocked  pathways that lead to a place where its residents go to bed at night having done all they can to survive one more day.

But there are sounds in this place that are hidden in the romanticized version of the painting.  In that pink house high up on the hill, three toddlers cry because they and their burning stomachs will go to bed without dinner.  In the brown house next to the church, an anguished mother recites the rosary for her teenaged son who has joined the drug trade because it is the only future he can see for himself.  Carpenters and welders and bricklayers drunkenly smash empty beer bottles off that swinging bridge as they try to drown out the fact that for every thousand carpenters in this city only one carpentry job is currently available.

And there is gunfire; oh man, is there ever.  Gangs rule this place with a heavy hand, and funeral processions down this mountain to the cemetery are much more frequent than paychecks in most of these homes.  Many of these houses used to have small shops in their living rooms, little pulperias that sold everything from plantain chips to cigarettes to shampoo.  They are mostly boarded up now; the owners couldn’t afford to pay the “war tax”—a stylized phrase for a shakedown—to the gang members that came to collect at the end of every week with pistols stuffed into their belts.

And something else hangs over this place, a quiet, dense layer of loss.  Though life here is people on top of people on top of people, this place is a little emptier than it used to be.  And that’s not only because of those who lost their lives to violence, though almost every person here carries a heaviness in his or her heart because of a loved one who met a violent death.  There are other stories of loss that, while not as permanent, still leave that painful emptiness.

There’s Juanita’s son David, who used to drive a taxi until the gang burned it to ashes because he couldn’t pay the war tax.  He and his wife packed a few things into backpacks, grabbed their newborn and fled one night without a trace.  And there is the house up the street that sits empty; the Ramirez family ran when their son turned twelve and became a ripe target for gang recruitment.  Suddenly, dozens of empty houses exist in this one neighborhood, which seems to have lost some of its vibrant color as families and neighbors united for decades have faded away.

Where do Hondurans go when they flee?  Their journeys have been frontpage news for a couple of years now, and they have become major talking points in the political wars that attempt to divide us into angry bands of red and blue.  I am not going to wade into that fight.  My main mission in life, providing a new life to kids living on the streets, consumes every ounce of energy, passion and intellect I have—and then some.  It doesn’t leave a lot of brain power for politics.

But let me tell you one more story:  I lost my Jefferson in a neighborhood like this one.  He had lived at the Micah House through most of 2015 and 2016, and I loved him like a son.  But because he was born on the streets to a mentally-ill prostitute, he never fully understood the inner workings of human attachment, and he never had an internal mechanism to help him know what it meant to be loved.   He would ask me almost every day, “Michael, am I doing ok today?  Am I behaving?”  Usually, he wasn’t in the least, but I would always say, “Yeah, Jeff, you’re doing okay. We love you and we’re so proud that you’re here.”

Jefferson’s struggles took him back to the streets in late 2016.  And last year, when he was only fourteen, one of the gangs kidnapped him, took him to a neighborhood just like the one in this painting, and executed him.  The next day, we collected his body from the morgue to bury him.  To the very end, he was a desperate, broken soul, doing what he could to survive before the situation on the streets made that impossible.

I am not saying that fleeing Honduras would have saved Jefferson.  In fact, another boy that lived in our home for several years, Marvincito, died on the border of Guatemala and Mexico in 2016 trying desperately to flee the same violence that killed Jefferson.  So please believe me when I say that I understand the terrible consequences of fleeing your country on foot.  But in the depth of my very broken heart, I also understand the reasons that many choose to do so.

I look at my painting one more time, at this beautiful, broken barrio.  And I know one thing for sure: God knows each of these houses as if it were His own; He knows who was born in each one and who died well before their time or in the fullness of their years. He knows the intimate details of the lives in the green one, and that lopsided yellow one, and even in that little grey home perched all the way up on top of this mountain of human souls.  He knows each of their names because they are written on his heart.

They are Juanita and David.  They are Jefferson and Marvincito.  They are His children, known by Him to the greatest depth of their souls and loved by Him with a fierce, Fatherly love that has no starting point and no final limit.  And though we live in a world where there are no easy answers to human suffering, we too, as God’s sons and daughters, can start and end with love.

Michael Miller