My time in North Africa has played out differently than I expected. From the moment I set foot on African soil, I could not help but be acutely aware of the urgency of our mission, and the caution and wisdom with which we had to approach it. We are in a strictly Islamic nation where it is illegal to proclaim the message of Jesus. Men and women who have done so have either been deported or thrown into jail and deprived of basic human needs. Some, whom I have known in years past, have been tortured. Secret police move unknown through the markets and streets, actively rooting out those who are labeled seditious or who are suspected to be evangelizing in Jesus’ name. Just getting to our host location was like a scene from a Jason Bourne movie, involving burner phones and multiple contacts on different street corners giving us directions in steps.
We didn’t come to the 10/40 window just to be “nice people.” We came to love people in the name of Christ and, for those who want it, to impart the gift of the Gospel. So how, exactly, are we supposed to operate in love and boldness and not fear? How, in a place like this, where freedom of religion is little better than a joke and all of the state sanctioned churches have informants visiting their congregations, do we do our job?
It’s actually pretty simple. Love wins. Always. There are moments of darkness, some that last for decades, but there has yet to be a form of darkness or oppression that can outdo God’s love in the end. The victory of God’s love is the punchline of the Gospel.
My team and I have been serving at an orphanage every day for the past two weeks. There are newborns, toddlers, elementary school aged children, and special needs children. According to local law, some of them cannot actually be adopted as they have at least one living parent, even if that parent cannot take care of them because of illness or drug addiction. Those who can be adopted can only go to parents who are from this particular country and only if the parents pledge to raise them to be Muslim. But even if all of that happens, an adopted child in this country can never take the family name of their adoptive parents or receive any inheritance from them. They cannot truly be part of the family.
Thankfully, God doesn’t operate according to North African law. His is the name from which every family under heaven derives their name. He offers sonship and daughterhood freely to anyone regardless of home country, economic status, or background. And He has a heart for these children.
We came with no other agenda than to love the kids at the orphanage. If any of us needed something more than the children’s status as orphans to break our hearts for them, God definitely provided it. Love struck fast.
Not five minutes after we arrived at the orphanage, there came another buzz at the door. A doctor and an ambulance driver strode in, followed by a police officer carrying a red blanket.
The woman in charge of the orphanage spoke rapidly to them in Arabic. They spoke back. She ushered them into her office and turned back toward my team, looking past us for the briefest moment, suddenly looking more weary – you know, as if she ran an over-capacity orphanage with everyone from newborns to special needs kids, or something. She recomposed quickly enough that I’m not sure if anyone else noticed that look. Then she addressed us.
Inside the police officer’s red blanket was a newborn baby so small no one on my team had guessed that there was anything actually inside the red bundle. The baby had just been found abandoned in the nearby area.
I don’t know if the baby was a boy or a girl. I don’t know who their mother is. I don’t know what the baby looks like – whether it is healthy or sick, handicapped or fully formed. None of that matters. I didn’t need to know any of that to feel a deep compassion for them, or for my heart to break for them at the thought of someone so helpless and innocent being abandoned by one of the people who was supposed to love them most in this world just hours after they left the womb. I don’t know who this child is, but I do know that they are a child of God, and that alone makes them worthy of love.
“This is how it happens,” the orphanage director said. Then she disappeared into her office and we were left with one simple instruction – go love them. And so we have.
Love is not a feeling. Love is a choice. Love is an action. Love is going to the two year old in the crib in the back corner of the room – the one whose head is misshapen because his club foot, the tumor on his face, and his inability to speak, walk, or see make him “undesirable to be held” – and picking him up and playing with him and speaking to him all day so that he knows someone cares. Love is holding the little boy who smells like urine because while all the other kids want to roughhouse, he just wants a hug. Love is smiling and laughing when you get gut punched by a gang of elementary school children who have formed their own pint-sized League of Shadows (Batman reference) to pretend-ninja fight you every day because they don’t have a father figure to wrestle with them. Love is helping a child navigate math and French homework, even if you hate math and never took French, because even though there are a million more entertaining things to do in that moment, that kid needs all the help they can get to attain better chances of a better life.
And love is doing all of those things in the name of Jesus, so that even when my team and I are gone, those children know that there is Someone who will always love them even more than we do and will never leave them or forsake them. Someone who will always call them His children – His family.
Christ’s love is winning in the hearts of these children, and that’s something no government, secret police, or power of hell can overcome.
