It's moments like I am about to describe that invite me to experience all sorts of emotions. It's moments like this that make me want to live a life that honors God's heart in James 1:27.
—
In total, I spent about 5 days with a ministry called Great Mercy. The ministry is located in a highly agricultural region near Kitale, Kenya. On the hillside where the property sits, there's a muddy dirt road that winds out of the neighborhood past corn fields, corn fields, and more corn fields. Most of the buildings on the Great Mercy property are made of a mishmash of mud, tin, block, brick, mortar and wood. I can't imagine the land is much more than an acre.
Every day you'll find well over 100 children running across rain puddles in the same navy and white school uniforms they wore the day before. Something like 82 children live full-time at the school/church/orphanage. The other half live there sometimes or at their homes.
One particular day out of the 5, we were walking with some of the children where they once lived before calling Great Mercy home. As we walked through an opening in a barbed wire fence, we came to this 3-doored, dark tin building about the length of my house back home. It was probably 20 feet deep, though, and each of those doors were the entrances to someone's home. One boy and three girls walking with us stepped up to the door in the center and told us the story of when they used to live there.
Their dad used to be a watchman at a property near there before he became sick. Eventually the kids lost their father, and the owner would not let the kids stay there anymore. They don't know where their mom is.
Ten-year-old Michael, the oldest of the four, looked down the front of their home and stopped trying to hold back his tears. I hugged him close, wiped the tears away, and started holding back tears of my own. As we walked back down the dirt path, Michael lifted the smallest of his sisters on his back and left us to go back to school.
It's moments like this that make this year worth it, and it's not because you got to pray for a kid and give them a hug. It's because you're inspired by people like Judith and Evans, the husband and wife Kenyan couple who started Great Mercy with 7 children 13 years ago. Now they care for all these children everyday as if each child is their own.
"Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world." James 1:27
His name is Jose.
That's Judith and Evans on the right.
They don't have children's church. They just have a church full of children.
