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Issue: Spring 2017 | Posted: June 1, 2017

Called out of Comfort

An engineering alumnus left stateside employment to minister in a Honduran orphanage

By Nathan Handley ('15)

In August 2016, Cody Giles boarded a plane bound for Honduras. He was headed to Orphanage Emmanuel, a place he had visited several times before.

But this time it wasn’t a visit. A month prior, Cody had quit a lucrative engineering job in Tennessee, and he was going to volunteer full-time at the orphanage with the estimate that his savings should allow him to live there for a year without pay.

Cody had visited Orphanage Emmanuel three times before, the first time as part of one of 51����’s GO Trips. He says the orphanage never left his mind when he was back in the states. He had met children whose pasts seemed irredeemable and had seen God at work through the orphanage, and he wondered how he could reconcile a frivolous life in the United States with what he had seen in Honduras.

“God was stirring a desire for something more in me,” Cody says.

Cody’s life in America was everything any 24-year-old could have asked for. He had a well-paying job, had maxed out his Roth IRA, and had put away 10 percent of his earnings into his 401k. He saved money and paid off all his student loan debt while still being able to live comfortably. He even invested in property, which he still rents out to tenants.

“I had all the best friends I could ask for,” Cody says. “I never felt lonely. I was eaten up with working out and bodybuilding. But the Holy Spirit made me uncomfortable with my state of life in America.”

Through time with God and experiences with different people, places and circumstances, Cody says God showed him that none of what he had been pursuing mattered. The American Dream began to seem like a big lie because it left him empty.

“Are we supposed to just go to school, work our whole lives, retire and then just live comfortably until we die?” Cody asks. “Heck no.”

Cody says he began to realize that everything he was doing was an attempt to fill himself, and none of it was working. He realized he wouldn’t be filled until he began truly living for Jesus.

“I literally looked up to heaven and said, ‘OK, Lord,’” Cody says. “And I felt the anxiety of ‘Am I doing what I should be?’ melt away. I finally felt like I was actually using my life for something that was worthwhile, something that would grow me in ways I never thought possible, and something that honored my Jesus who died for me.”

That’s when Cody began to make plans to move to Honduras. God had never allowed Orphanage Emmanuel to leave his mind, and he knew it was where he needed to be.

Cody first visited Orphanage Emmanuel a year and half earlier, in the spring of 2014. He was one of many Union students who used their spring and summer breaks to minister on GO Trips around the world.

Cody says he first saw the name “Orphanage Emmanuel” on a small sheet of paper in the hallway of the Student Union Building at Union at the beginning of his senior year. He had been considering participating in a GO Trip, and as he prayed about the various opportunities, the Honduras trip quickly rose to the top.

“It’s funny how God can take me grabbing a little slip of paper from a GO Trip table and turn it into me quitting my comfortable, well-paying job in America with all my friends and hobbies and moving to an orphanage,” Cody says. “That’s what Jesus does to people though, and it’s pretty cool.”

The first things Cody noticed in Honduras were the differences from the United States. The food was strange, water was sold in bags at gas stations, and simply riding in a car was exciting as the drivers paid little attention to traffic laws, coming inches from each other yet never wrecking.

But Orphanage Emmanuel was more familiar. Its lawns were well-maintained, and its buildings were newer, a stark contrast to most of the city and not at all what Cody expected from an orphanage.

“It seemed more like a summer camp,” Cody says. “Nobody was hurting, crying, sick or hungry. They had a hospital there, a dentist, beds of their own, three meals a day, a school, Bible studies, a church and the list goes on. Everything seemed perfect.”

On that first trip, Cody spent most of his time doing manual projects around the orphanage—harvesting tilapia and laying concrete for a greenhouse. He became close with many of his fellow Union students, and many of those friendships remained with him once he returned to the states. But so did Orphanage Emmanuel.

Cody returned to Honduras twice after that trip, once the following summer and once in January 2015, after graduating with his bachelor’s degree in engineering. It was on these subsequent trips that he got to know the kids, and he saw that behind the well-kept grass, brick buildings and happy faces were children in great need. All of the more than 450 kids at the orphanage had lost their parents in some way, and many had other terrible experiences in their pasts. Even though they lived relatively well, they had needs beyond food, clothing and shelter.

“You can’t give people everything they need and expect them to be fine and perfectly happy,” Cody says. “Three warm meals a day, a dentist and a bed to sleep in doesn’t wipe away the past.”

Cody remembers an evening where he asked one of his Honduran friends a simple question about how he grew up—a question that would seem innocent enough to most people in the United States. But his friend’s eyes immediately filled with tears as he muttered, “I don’t really feel ready to talk about that, man.”

“That’s why I’m here,” Cody says. “The look in these kids’ eyes stays with me.”

A few months after moving to Honduras, Cody had already put his engineering knowledge to use. He built an Excel sheet for cost/benefit analysis of the orphanage’s dairy cows and created concrete septic clean-out boxes. He was able to teach other volunteers and employees how to fix things and do things in the most efficient ways. He says the thing he values most from his engineering education is the ability to think critically and solve problems.

“I have all this knowledge floating around in my head about electromagnetism and thermodynamics,” he says. “But it’s the practical, street smart, common sense, figure-it-out knowledge that I took away from being at Union that has helped me most.”

Wade McCollum, executive director of Orphanage Emmanuel, says as the orphanage continues to grow, so do its challenges, and the challenges are not limited to engineering. He says Cody and other volunteers have helped in agriculture, nursing, human development, general maintenance, education and vocational training.

“Volunteers help to fulfill responsibilities in these areas to benefit the children of Orphanage Emmanuel and themselves as well,” McCollum says. “In my opinion, anyone who wishes to help other people while making themselves more aware of the world around them should serve somewhere in short-term missions, preferably overseas.”

Cody says his priority at the orphanage was always the relationships. He says he can hardly count the lessons the orphanage and the people there taught him. They showed him how real Jesus was on earth and is now. They reinforced the importance of loving others more than himself. They taught him to be happy in tiring and hard situations and to live with people he doesn’t necessarily get along with.

But Cody says the most significant thing he learned was to enjoy each day that God has given him – to not look ahead to a weekend or vacation and not turn back to dwell in the past.

“God is a today God,” Cody says. “He knows our past and future, but in his full and perfect love he loves us today in this day.”

In February 2017, Cody returned to the United States. His stay in Honduras was shorter than he anticipated, but he says his relationship with the orphanage isn’t over. He hopes to return there soon, and he wants to work with other orphanages as well.

“For now, I’m back in America,” Cody says. “But I can’t go back to my comfortable American life. I know that’s not what God has called me to.”

Cody says this is where he has found peace. He doesn’t know when he will return to Honduras or what he will do next, but he knows what he is supposed to do in the meantime.

“There’s one thing I know,” he says. “As long as I’m living for Jesus today, He will carry me the rest of the way.”

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20 Years of Partnership with Orphanage Emmanuel

This year marks the 20th year of 51����’s partnership with Orphanage Emmanuel in Honduras. Todd Brady, Union’s vice president for university ministries, visited the 900-acre orphanage site for the first time in 1997 while he was serving as campus minister. He was looking for ways to mobilize students for missions, and the newly established orphanage provided a perfect opportunity for that.

“It became a staple of our mobilization program,” Brady says. “A great trip to take students who had never been overseas before.”

In the first several years of the partnership, teams of Union students worked on building projects, pouring a lot of concrete and doing manual construction for the ever-growing orphanage. In recent years, the teams have worked to maintain buildings and build a more efficient infrastructure.

Union employee Kayla Corona plays with a child at Orphange Emanuel.

“One of the greatest challenges at Orphanage Emmanuel is the great energy cost,” Brady says. “That’s why we got our engineering students involved working on projects to help them save money.”

In 2016, engineering students designed and installed solar water heaters to cut down on electricity costs. They have also installed solar panels and other devices to help conserve energy on lighting.

Wade McCollum, who serves as executive director of Orphanage Emmanuel along with his wife, Lourdes, says Union students have influenced the lives of countless children through their work at the orphanage. But the orphanage has also helped the students by opening their eyes to another part of the world and giving them challenges to overcome.

“They get exposure to a different country’s lifestyle while here that is very different from that of the states,” McCollum says. “Emmanuel being the size of a small town population-wise creates a challenging environment with unique situations in which to serve. These challenges help the students to have hands-on problem-solving experiences.”

McCollum says the orphanage anticipates the Union trip every year, and they are grateful for all the work Union has done over the past two decades. Brady says this is one of the primary goals of GO Trips. He wants to see good work done on the field.

“When we walk away, we want our partners there to say, ‘We couldn’t do this work had the team from Union not been here,’” Brady says.

He says Union tries to select GO Trips that appeal to the skills of lots of different students so they realize they can use those skills for the glory of God. He wants to see students engage in different settings so that they can learn and grow as followers of Christ.

“A lot of times the greatest insights come from cross-cultural service,” Brady says. “We want them to experience that our God is a global God, and the world does not look like our hometowns.”