“I can’t wait until I have a heart again,” That’s the statement I would use with my coworkers before I left for the Race. I was half kidding, but the other half of me knew the statement was sadly true.
Before I came on the Race I was a social worker for children and families. Most of the kids on my caseload came from backgrounds that would make a person cringe, gasp in horror, or weep uncontrollably. But once you see a certain amount of cases, there’s a part of yourself that you shut off. You become desensitized to the daily horrors of child welfare and unintentionally dehumanize the children you work with. Even as a Christian you start to feel a sense of hopelessness because you label the things you see as normal and it is so easy to become defeated.
The thing that drove me to Child Welfare in the beginning was this compassion for the broken, something that I know the Lord has gifted me with. But as I saw more kids coming into the system daily, my compassion slowly started to be replaced with anger, bitterness, and a need to see justice served. I was hardened by my work and I had no idea what to do about it.
As I started to prepare for the Race, I knew one of the things the Lord wanted to do was soften my heart again. He wanted to remind me of the love for people He had instilled in me, especially for children. He was going to give me back the compassion that He always meant for me to have.
And that’s what happened last month at El Shaddai. As I met the children that lived in the children’s home on the mountaintop, the Lord allowed me to feel sorrow for these children. They weren’t just names and faces among thousands in a system. They were children who had been broken. He allowed me to weep over their stories and to have an ache in my heart that had been missing for quite some time.
But then He did something beautiful. He told me to stop mourning for the things that were lost and start celebrating the things that came out of their rescue. As He said that to me, He started listing off a few things: healing, redemption, hope, joy, restoration. He showed me that future leaders would come out of this children’s home. He reminded me that’s there’s a beautiful anointing over these precious children. And above all these children have found an unshakable love from the King of Kings Himself. It’s a love that reaches to the depths of their brokenness and promises to restore their lives.
I am so grateful for my time in Swaziland with the beautiful children at El Shaddai. I am so grateful that the Lord allowed me to see the brokenness in their stories, and through that the hope that will be born from people that have truly known brokenness. These are the children that the Lord will use to bring the Kingdom to Earth and I am so blessed to have seen the new beginnings the Lord has for them.
It has been such a beautiful thing to see the Lord fulfill the promises He has given me for the Race. I am so grateful that He has reignited my passion to reach out to hurting and broken people, and through that allowed me to see that hope and healing are truly possible for those I reach out to with the love of Christ. By giving me my heart back, I know that the Lord has made it possible to truly love those around me well, and that is something I will be eternally grateful for.
If you would like to be a part of bringing hope and redemption to these beautiful children, you can sponsor them at james127.org.
