Articles from June 2018

“This is very hard because we’ve never thought about God before.”

It's easy to trust God when you know what's going on and what He has planned. But trusting God in the waiting? Trusting Him in the silence?

Bouncers have made progress at their work sites this week in Nederland, Port Arthur and Orange Texas. The "Blue Dodge" Team has been hard at work at a location in Groves, TX where they have been doing inside demolition work. The Team has spent most of their time installing cabinets, which has proved challenging. Though there have been set backs in the group with the cabinet installation, the group has maintained a positive attitude.

Bouncers were commissioned this morning in Nederland, TX by Aaron Austin the Mission Coordinator. Bouncers woke up early this morning for breakfast at 6 am, and then were sent off to their work sites for the week. Aaron led the Bouncers in prayer and reminded them that they will serve as a light to those in Nederland and and Port Arthur, TX this week.

Monday, the Supreme Court decided Masterpiece Cakeshop v Colorado Civil Rights Commission in a 7-2 decision in favor of Masterpiece and its owner, Jack Phillips. While Phillips asked the Supreme Court to consider his First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and free exercise of religion, the Court actually only addressed his free exercise claim.

By Jaclyn Bonner

My late grandmother, Edna Wood Bonner, grew up during the Great Depression. She sought to emulate the strength and selflessness she saw modeled by her own mother, Maggie Wood, who became a single parent of seven shortly after my grandmother and her twin brother were born.

It does not require statistics from the 1930s to understand the difficulties Maggie faced. She labored under the hot sun daily as a cotton picker, but this did not provide an income adequate to raise two sets of twins and three other daughters alone.

Like many mothers who desire the best for their children, Maggie made the difficult decision to place her children in institutionalized care. In 1932, at the age of eight, Edna and her twin brother were sent to the local orphanage, joining their siblings and other children whose parents were deceased or unable to care for their primary needs.

While the current economic situation of our nation does not rival that of the Great Depression, hunger is still hurting families today.

Feeding Texas reports that a study released by the United States Department of Agriculture found that 1.4 million Texas households were food insecure from 2014-2016. One in seven families in our state, 14.3 percent of households, are unable to put food on the table every night.

Hunger in Texas is higher than the national average*, but it is only a microcosm of the pervasiveness and severity of global hunger. The World Food Programme announced that 815 million people, one in nine, go to bed hungry every night. One in three people in the world are malnourished.