Scripture guides Redmond couple to calling in Guatemala

Diane and Will Boegel are nearing the deadline to purchase a $400,000 farm and convert it to a home for impoverished children
 
BY TERRY MCGUIRE

Diane Boegel, shown holding Horan and Ana during a visit to Guatemala, is working with her husband, Dr. Will Boegel, to establish a home for impoverished children in the Central American country. Photo: Wil & Diane Boegel

Follow Jesus Christ and you don’t know from one day to the next what he has in mind for you, says Diane Boegel.

Last year at this time, for instance, Boegel and her physician husband, Dr. Will Boegel, members of St. Jude Parish in Redmond, had no idea they’d be trying to raise $400,000 to purchase a 59-acre farm in Guatemala and turn it into a home for impoverished children and a medical clinic for the community.

“We didn’t choose this project, it was shown to us (by the Lord),” said Will Boegel. “We’re just being obedient, following this calling.”

The couple’s journey towards Guatemala began about 17 years ago. That’s when Diane felt compelled by a vision to turn to Psalm 113, which reads in part:

He raises up the lowly from the dust, from the dunghill he lifts up the poor
To seat them with princes, with the princes of his own people.
He establishes in her home the barren wife as the joyful mother of children.

Diane Boegel didn’t know what to make of the passage’s meaning in her life. Was she to be the mother of her own children; the mother of others?

She said that over the years more prophetic visions and dreams came that better defined what their role might be. She found direction in different scriptural passages, such as the call in Isaiah 61 to “bring glad tidings to the lowly” and “to comfort all who mourn.”

Over the years she came to sense that the children would be the children of others; they would be of one nationality; they would be children in Latin America.

9/24 becomes significant date
The Boegels have volunteered their talents – he as a podiatrist and she as a surgical technologist – on short medical mission trips to Guatemala, Mexico, Egypt and Vietnam. But “we didn’t know what all these mission trips were really leading to,” Will Boegel said.
Diane Boegel wondered if their surgical mission to Guatemala in 2004 might’ve been “the answer to what God had been saying to me.”

They had departed for Guatemala that year on Sept. 24. Years earlier, while reading the Bible, Diane had been inspired by a passage in the Book of Haggai that referred to that date. In the passage, the Lord speaks to the prophet Haggai on the 24th day of the ninth month, telling him to “consider from this day forward…Indeed, the seed has not sprouted, nor have the vine, the fig, the pomegranate and the olive tree yet borne. From this day, I will bless.” (Hg 2:18-19).

The date would later surface at other significant moments in her life.

Then last January, to celebrate Will’s 50th birthday, the Boegels turned down an offer to vacation in Hawaii and opted instead to do “something purposeful and hopefully fruitful” with the birthday trip. So they returned to Guatemala. They recently had met the director of the medical clinic where they had served when he was in Seattle. They decided a visit to his street ministry in Guatemala City would be a unique birthday present.

“This was no mission trip,” Will Boegel said. We had “no formal agenda.”

Their visit with the street ministry was an intense experience, they recalled. They saw a world where street children inhale paint thinner to get high to forget their hunger and cold. The Boegels also met the Guatemalan girl whom they had been sponsoring for years. They learned that she had just lost her mother to AIDS and was now living with her unemployed uncle.

A hunt for property
Seeking a break from the gloom, the couple headed for the countryside and the picturesque volcanic Lake Atitlan to relax. Diane said she had had a vision of seeing the Blessed Virgin holding the hands of children on a mountain. While at the lake, they decided to look at two pieces of property for sale, and were inspired by the sight of a Carmelite convent in the area. The Carmelites’ “patron saint is Mary,” Diane Boegel said, “and I’m thinking, ‘God is saying that property is on that mountain.’

“So we went on our knees and we started to pray,” she said, and the call of Psalm 113 came back to them.

They felt the first piece of property, a three-acre parcel, was within their financial means. When they were outbid on it, they took that as a sign that one door had closed and another had opened.

Still, the 59-acre farmland, where some 5,000 avocados are harvested annually, was way too expensive for them. They bid on it anyway, realizing they were simply “instruments” of what God had in mind, Diane said.

They put $50,000 of their own money down as an earnest payment and have until Dec. 22 to raise the rest of the $400,000.

By late last month they had raised $320,000, Will Boegel said, and they are confident the property will be theirs, “especially since God promised us that he would provide.”

The farmland includes three furnished houses with bunk beds, so it’s “almost all ready to move in,” he said.

They hope to start with a few children under five, and eventually house 12 of them, like the “12 disciples,” Diane said. They would be schooled at a mission school about 15 minutes away. Eventually, the Boegels, who have three grown children of their own, hope to open the country’s first children’s hospital.

Stone with a broken heart
They’re grateful for all the community help they’ve received toward purchasing the property via various fundraisers and contributions. A fellow parishioner, who wishes to remain anonymous, has donated two manufactured homes to sell for the cause, Will Boegel said.

“Our parish has been so supportive, it humbles us, and makes me want to cry,” Diane Boegel said. “Father Dave (Rogerson, St. Jude pastor) has given out of his own means.”
Father Rogerson, for his part, said he is impressed with the couple’s willingness to take such a leap of faith “not knowing exactly what the future is going to bring.

“Their hearts went out to the orphans in Guatemala and they found they just needed to respond and make it work somehow,” he said.

He called the Boegels “big picture” people who’ve gathered the “detail people” to make their dream become reality.

The Boegels are calling their project “Opal House.”

The opal, with its multiple fissures, has been called the “stone with a broken heart,” Diane Boegel said, and the light reflecting from those fissures becomes more brilliant the more broken the stone.

It’s the same way when we come to Christ, she said.

“The more broken, the more humble we are, the more that Christ is able to shine in us, and the more brilliant we become.”

Opal House, she said, “is going to be a place where broken children come in and they find the light of Christ.”