The Family That Sold Everything for a Country They'd Never Seen

In 2019, the Hernandez family — Marco, his wife Elena, and their three children — sold their home in suburban Dallas, liquidated Marco's profitable landscaping business, and moved to rural Guatemala to build a medical clinic in a village with no running water. Their friends thought they had lost their minds. Marco's father refused to speak to him for six months.

"People kept asking us for the business plan," Elena later told a reporter from the Dallas Morning News. "We didn't have one. We had a calling."

They arrived in San Pedro Necta with two suitcases, enough savings for eighteen months, and no guarantee of anything beyond that. The first year was brutal — permits stalled, supplies were stolen, and their youngest daughter got dengue fever. But by 2022, the clinic was treating four hundred patients a month, staffed by local nurses Marco and Elena had trained themselves.

Abraham packed up his household and walked toward a land he could not yet see on a map. The writer of Hebrews tells us he was "looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God." He didn't need a five-year strategic plan. He needed the voice of the Almighty and the willingness to move his feet.

Faith is not the absence of uncertainty. It is obedience in the middle of it — trusting that the God who calls is also the God who builds.