Our Start
I remember it as if it was yesterday, when God gave me this verse… It was the way I began each new year, seeking God’s word to me. So, I took these words as a very personal promise. His plan for me as I had been sensing was about to be revealed…
And that my life would never be the same…
Little did I know at that moment that God’s word would eventually become the founding verse of The Servant’s Heart… a promise that I would share with thousands of people I had yet to meet…and in a new language I had never before spoken…
"For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future." Jeremiah 29:11
My personal call into ministry began with a vague sense of knowing, knowing I was to make a change - and what a change that would be! I was already 43 years old, and I had returned to college to get yet another degree - this time in nursing.
After leaving the corporate management world, my journey with God truly began… into the great unknown. It's an adventure that still goes on today. Finishing nursing school was just the beginning.
That career change enabled me to go on a short-term mission trip to Guatemala. Seven months after receiving that prophetic word in Jeremiah, I found myself with 15 other Americans - none of whom I knew - in Mexico and then Guatemala.
We were there to paint some Christian day schools and build playground sets. On our last day there, I felt a bit frustrated over not having met very many Guatemalans. Then two Guatemalan women came to the school we were painting and offered us coconut ice cream and a visit to the garbage dump.
The coconut ice cream made sense. It was something refreshing after a hard day’s work. Visiting the garbage dump, however, didn’t. Why - who in their right mind would visit a garbage dump?
But off we went in the pouring rain - 15 of us packed like sardines in the back of a pick up truck. As we approached the dump, the stench of rotting garbage filled the air. The sky became a moving sea of black. (I soon learned this was a sea of vultures eyeing their prey). As we arrived at the edge of the dirt road leading into the dump, I realized we were no longer in just the third world.
We were about to enter a 4th world… where tall, white and light-haired Americans had never gone.
Our eyes saw only mounds and mounds of garbage… as far as the eye could see. On top of that garbage were thousands of plastic and cardboard shanties where people were actually living.
There were unending rows of these shanties. Between the rows were trenches filled with raw sewage.
People were living here... Babies were sleeping on dirt floors - floors that were quickly becoming more like rivers as the torrential rains of summer filled the ravines.
Wild dogs fought with little children over tiny scraps of food to eat from the garbage.
Cardboard boxes became makeshift cribs for the babies.
I am still unable to adequately describe what I saw that day with my eyes. Today, the dump is much smaller… and people no longer live on top of the mounds of trash. But they live around it… and still work in it.
And yet… it still defies description.
As I came to know over the next few years… for most of the people I met that day, this was the only life they’d ever known.
Despair surrounded us. People’s empty eyes reflected what was behind them… hopelessness.
And yet…in spite of the hideous sensory overload… God seemed to be saying…this is where I want you to be… not quite yet, but soon.
You will tell these people of my great love for them… of the plan I have for their lives… for their hope and their future.
After about three hours of visiting the squalor that would become where my feet would walk daily, we walked back up the hills of garbage.
And we gathered at the truck… speechless. At that very moment, the rain stopped. As we looked up into the skies, God seemed to make the clouds disappear. Instead, he put a full rainbow over the entire dump - over the garbage and despair where we had just been walking…
And I heard his voice saying…"You are home."
This is how The Servant’s Heart began.
The sea of empty eyes I had seen in the garbage dump that day in July, 1990… the filthy little children without shoes, eating garbage. The teen moms with five children and another on the way… eking out a living by scavenging through the trash.
Now it made sense. Those words in Jeremiah were not just for me. They were for all of these people I would know and love.
And it was and is to them we go.
God made it clear whom we were to serve. The suffering, the poor, the widows, children, society’s throw-always, the desperate living in urban chaos and danger without hope. Without a way out. They were the untouchables, the sick, the drug addicts, the hungry, the lost, the prostitutes, the poor without even a penny for food. They were the ones who mourned their family members who were massacred during 50 years of civil war.
God sent us right there… to all those to whom the world had closed its doors.
God called me - he called us - all those who are now serving this ever growing group of people.
And He created The Servant’s Heart. He taught us how to serve, love, show compassion and mercy with his heart.
The purest servant of all… The Servant’s Heart.
Just as Jesus went out to these same people of his day… we went and continue to go to them daily.
My heart and life found its home in the garbage dump of Guatemala that rainy day in 1990.
We continue to seek God’s will for our ministry… wherever that may lead us.
So if you hear God’s still small voice whispering something to your heart today, or tomorrow…
Pay attention. Because wherever you follow him promises to be an incredible journey - full of joy and sorrows, adventure, surprises and indescribable peace!!!
He takes the most unlikely people…
To the most unlikely places…
To do miraculous things…
If we only say yes!
Today The Servant’s Heart continues to grow, touching thousands of lives across the U.S. and Guatemala.
He started with one, but now we are many. And we collectively keep the doors open as a refuge to the broken hearted, bringing hope to the hopeless. And so ours is a story of hope. God’s heart becoming ours... The Servant’s Heart.
~ Carla Burnell, Founder