As most of our readers know, outreach and vision trips are a regular occurrence here at Beautiful Gate Lesotho. Rarely a month goes by where we don’t have a visiting team here to serve our care staff, love our children, and help improve and maintain our campus. This year is no different. Already we’ve had a few teams offer themselves as living sacrifices for God’s Kingdom work at Beautiful Gate, and we are preparing for a whole slew of teams yet to come. Over the last few months, though, we had the unique opportunity to welcome back teams from two high schools that we’ve been able to cultivate relationships with.
In March we were privileged to host a team of students and adults representing Parker Lutheran High School in Parker, Colorado, USA. This was the second team we’ve been able to interact with from this school. In addition to the normal team activities of serving our housemothers, doing household chores, and assisting with caring for the kids, they also led our weekly chapel time. As their big work project, this group blessed us richly with a brand new, beautiful playground structure. Not only did they bring over plans and certain materials from the US to put the structure together, but they also endured the challenge of seemingly unending rain during construction. They didn’t let the rain dampen their spirits, though. By the time they left us their hard work had paid off, and our children have enjoyed playing on an incredible playground ever since.
In June we welcomed back another team from Holland Christian High School in Holland, Michigan, USA. It is always a joy to have HC students on our campus, as we’ve been able to cultivate an awesome relationship with the school since 2012. As always, their schedule left little room for down time. Again, like most teams, they spent much time giving our care staff a much-needed hand taking care of their homes and their children. They, too, led our weekly chapel time and one of the students graciously offered prayer to any of our staff who needed it. This team’s work project for the duration of the week was helping us begin a renovation project in the baby house bathrooms. Team members were literally knocking down walls as they helped us make more space in the bathrooms. Even though they were only able to help start this project, they worked hard to make sure the bathrooms are still usable while reconstruction is in progress.
While having a large group of new people on campus can be a little crazy, we have been gifted so much over the years by our visiting outreach teams. Parker Lutheran and Holland Christian are two more examples of just that. Though they do help us immensely with the day-to-day, physical work and projects, the greater blessings are the relationships that form and the ability to watch God work in team members’ hearts and lives in brand new ways.
Thank you Parker Lutheran! Thank you Holland Christian! We are so grateful for how you’ve chosen to continually partner with us on this journey God has us on. We look forward to the next time you are with us.