a huge difference

Several months ago I was snow skiing in the Colorado mountains. It was the same trip that I busted up my shoulder and my pride. It is also the last time I wrote a blog. Can t explain why but here I am again.

It was during that ski trip I remember one particular ride up a Vail ski lift that I was nearly mesmerized by the shear beauty of the snow covered mountains. It was literally breathtaking. I could see thousands of people skiing on the unlimited acres of beautiful powdered snow. As I was riding up the lift I also remember thinking to myself that just one week earlier I was in the Caribbean country of Haiti hanging out with hundreds of little orphan kids who were now living in C3 children s homes.

Knowing that none of these little guys had ever seen snow and probably never would, I remember thinking how different their lives were from the kids skiing down the mountain. Not necessarily better or worse, just different.

I share this because Saturday I was on those same Colorado mountains. This time I was torturing myself by riding my bicycle 80 miles form Copper Mountain to Leadville, over Vail pass and back to Copper Mountain. A grueling (for me) 80 mile ride over three mountain passes with several thousand feet of vertical climb. A silly thing for a Kansas City rider like me to do because it takes about two hours to get up each mountain and only 20 minutes to ride back down. Doesn t make a lot of sense but several thousand riders were doing it.

Anyway, as I was riding up the mountains I had a lot of time to see the beauty of God s creation. No really, a lot of time. These same mountains that were covered with snow in February are just as beautiful in the summer. The snow has been replaced by flowers and meadows, rivers and lakes.

Here s the irony. As I made one particularly grueling climb up a mountain, I again reminded myself that just two weeks ago I was visiting my same little buddies in Haiti as I did in February. Although the Colorado weather was radically different, the weather in Haiti was exactly the same. Always is. The kids were actually the same. Always are. Happy, funny, some a little bit silly. Same little houses, same little schools.

But there is one huge difference in Haiti today than there was in February. And it is a huge difference. Today there are more than 300 precious little kids living in C3 homes than there were in February. Three hundred more little lives that have been saved by the help of ordinary people like you and me. A difference bigger than the Colorado mountains.