Not One Nameless

Despite having had a wash, my feet are still wearing a little of the dirt from four days living in a small community not far from the Hands @ Work base. 12 of us stayed in different homes across the village, some with 14 kids and no adult carer, some with a Gogo (grandmother) and her orphaned grandchildren, some even with TVs! As for me, I stayed with a family I will certainly never forget - a 26 year old brother, his 18 and 14 year old sisters (all of them orphans) and beyond the house an extended family comprising a couple of other brothers and their wives and kids. These young people stood over their father’s grave in 2004 and then their mother’s in 2007. The youngest was just 10 when her mother died and she was left in the care of her brother and sister. I couldn’t help but think what kind of a story this would be back home in the UK, what I would do if I were to wander into the lives of three orphaned kids living in my neighbourhood, left alone in a house with two rooms, two chairs, two beds, a single mat, a stove for cooking and two spoons for cutlery. What would I do? What would the local church do? I don’t know, but what is for sure is that this family would be the talk of the town. With such a tragic story the local newspapers would eat it up, take photos of their home. Before they knew it they would be in the great care of the UK’s social services and government benefits. That’s if it was in the UK.

Actually, the world is wrought with this story.

Literally millions upon millions of children in sub-Saharan Africa, not to mention the entire third-world, grow up without a father or a mother. Staring into the face of such a monstrous statistic, the human mind simply can’t comprehend and the human heart simply can’t cope. I once watched as George Snyman (the founder of Hands) poured approximately 130,000 grains of rice into a big bucket to indicate the number of children made orphans in sub-Saharan Africa every month. It was difficult to muster the compassion and anguish for such a great number until George pulled out a single grain of rice and reminded us: “Every child has a name.” Why don’t we make a difference? Why don’t we read this story daily in the newspaper? Because we don’t know their names. For every single orphan there is a story. Don’t feel guilty that your heart doesn’t break at the Oxfam advert you see while you’re eating dinner. The human mind simply can’t comprehend and the human heart simple can’t cope until you meet one child, one family, one story. A name is more powerful than a statistic. 130,000 orphans may not move our fat hearts, but the face and name of a single child will. Why? Because they’re cute? No. Because as you get close their story invades yours, and yours invades theirs. You discover that they have a thumbprint. You discover that, just like you, God has counted every hair on their head and, just like you, gazed over every moment of their life in awe. I like this comparison: In a single field there might be hundreds of thousands of plants and flowers. Most of them will never be seen, most of them never plucked and smelt or admired. Yet God crafted every one of them. He intimately designed each one, set it in its place and adorned its quiet few days or weeks on earth knowing that it would never be seen. This isn’t soppy Christian sentimentality, it is solid truth. And there are fields and fields of orphaned children. Most of them we will never know, and I’m learning that that’s okay. It was not an overwhelming anguish that brought me back to Africa but the memory of a 7 year old Zambian girl named Grace who I met a year before. I came here for two people, Jesus and Grace, and yet the more stories that invade me and the more names that etch themselves on my heart and memory, the more reasons I have to stay. Not one of these children is forgotten. Not one nameless. Not one that God hasn’t created and cherished. I encourage you, in whatever direction and to whatever cause Christ has called you (and he has called you, whoever you are), to boldly position yourself to be invaded by the names, stories and lives of those you seek to help. Every new name, every new story, serves to empower the cause. We probably won’t change the world if it’s the whole world we seek to change. Better rather that we serve to rescue an orphaned world for the sake of just one orphaned heart. Statistics are no weapon against apathy, but apathy has no power over a heart scarred by faces, names and stories. I cannot live in lethargy while I know that that family I stayed with lives in hopeless poverty. My heart won’t allow it. You have to make the choice between half-heartedness or broken-heartedness. There doesn’t seem to be another option.

The Nobody Revolution

This week I visited a community about an hour away from the Hands @ Work base. It is one of the poorest of all the nearby communities in the country’s most AIDS infected region. A couple of us were invited to see the free clinic. We walked into a narrow corridor in which we could barely move for all the people, young and old, mothers and children, waiting for treatment. It was a great clinic with great facilities, but the stark hopelessness evident in the place was that many of these people, even with the treatment offered, would die. I couldn’t bring myself to ask what one young baby no older than a few months was suffering with that made him cough so much in the arms of his young Mum. I realise that hope never comes easy. Yet the place where it is most important to cling to hope is in the place where it is most difficult to do so. For these people, hope is not found in the faces of the few mlungu (white folk) that pass through their lives, and it certainly isn’t to be sought in the offices of government. As a care worker that walked me through the clinic yesterday said, presidents and politicians will never hear the names of communities like this one. For them the places where there is no hope are best forgotten and left to die. And yet here hope does have a face. And a name. Let me tell you Roger’s story.

Roger is a young man, no older than 20. He is himself an orphan and a carer for younger siblings, yet on top of that he’s also the youth worker for the entire community, a group that comprises many of his own peers. We spent a little bit of time with Roger as the village’s most vulnerable kids (themselves orphans) came together to be fed by the care workers. Afterwards we watched as Roger gathered the whole group together: young kids, teenage boys causing trouble, even the care workers themselves, and he spoke to them. Someone translated for us later what he had said. He told them that everything in life is a gift given without cost. It was therefore their responsibility to give of themselves freely, and in doing so they would make a difference in their worlds. He told them that with gratitude and with courage they could change the world around them. I looked to Roger and saw that with his words and with his life he is bringing waves of hope to those most destitute of it. God is using him to breathe life into dry bones. He is a light in a valley of darkness and death. And yet...the world will never know his name. He’s not going to win a Nobel Prize for services to the poor. He will probably never be invited to speak at a Christian festival or write an article for a Christian magazine. He is in all respects a ‘nobody’. Yet he is changing the world in the name of Christ.  The Kingdom of God is upside down, or you could say right side up. God loves to use nobodies. In fact it’s the only people he uses. Why? Because “man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.” The Kingdom turns the world right-side up and translates cowards into warriors, murderers into deliverers, the childless into fathers and nobodies into princes. The Kingdom of God belongs to those by whose hands it is built. We don’t know their names yet, but there is a silent army that knows the heart of the Father and is living to be beautiful feet in a broken world. These ‘nobodies’ will be the champions of heaven. I am amazed every day by the servant heart of those who care for the sick and the vulnerable in their communities. Many do it without incentive and all do it without pay. Yesterday I met a woman who walked 20km from her home to visit the children, then 20km back. Such is the life of a servant – spending themselves on behalf of the poor. For us too, we must bring what we can, but if we want to affect the world we have to start with our own hearts. We have to do everything from a desperate desire to serve. Jesus said of John the Baptist that there has never been anyone greater in the Kingdom of God. Why? Because he prayed from a genuine heart: “Jesus must become more, I must become less!” Do you know why Jesus is the King of heaven? Paul tells us. It’s because he humbled himself, more than any man or woman ever has or could hope to – the God of the universe, forgotten and alone on a cross (Philippians 2). It takes trust not to puff up yourself but to let God do the exalting. Yet we have to stick a flag in the ground and decide where our loyalty lies – to invest in these miserable few years of TV and taxes, or to live the servant’s life and claim the champion’s honour in heaven. By the sweat and tears of ‘nobodies’ like Roger the Kingdom of God is being built and the world transformed. We are desperately in need of a revolution of nobodies.

A heart for adventure

I think that the heart of every man longs for adventure. In the deep place of a man’s soul there is an inexhaustible desire to be a part of something bigger than himself. Something that draws out of him as if by demand the potential and purpose and destiny of his life. He wants to discover something of such worth that it deserves everything he is, like the treasure hidden in the field. It’s why men go to war, why they chase after the most beautiful girls, why they seek to explore and conquer the unknown. It’s why men build homes and families, because there as in few other places the adventure is truly deserving of the cost. And it is why I’m starting a new adventure! Stepping into God’s call for me to head out to the wilds of Africa, not knowing what I will discover or what I will encounter, simply makes me come alive. It sets my heart going! I cannot wait to see what God has in store. I don’t know where he’ll lead me, or what he’ll have me do along the way, but of one thing I am sure: following Jesus is always the most extravagant and the most demanding adventure.

When Jesus said “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also”, he wanted us to recognise that everyone spends themselves in the cause of something, that much is inevitable. The only uncertainty is whether they will discover something that is actually deserving of their heart. And so it is such a tragedy when a man believes, for whatever reason, that he has plumbed the depths of what life has in store for him. It’s a tragedy when the great discovery of a man’s life is the belief that there is nothing worth discovering, nothing worthy of cost, no true adventure to which he is called. That’s the making of a lifelong sleep-walker. He bumbles about, never really questioning the direction in which he’s moving because he’s stopped believing that there is a destiny for him to walk into. Wake up, man! The only thing that could possibly disqualify you from your destiny is an unwillingness to step into it. Every man’s heart longs for adventure because adventure is what he was made for. He was called to discovery, but he stops longing for it because he stops dreaming of undiscovered lands. The world rips the idea out of him. Actually, it just cements over it. Like the people of Columbus’ day who urged him not to set sail, not to venture beyond the realm of the known world for fear of falling off its edge, today we have our own fainthearted land-dwellers to contend with. A man is told that “day-dreaming is for children.” In church, he might be told that he needs to be humble, and humility means putting away dreams of changing the world in exchange for simply sweeping the floor - doing the busy work. Yet look to all the great heroes of our heritage. Mother Teresa, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Francis of Assisi, Jesus himself. The greatest impact upon the world is made by those who dream with audacious imagination and live with radical servanthood. Dreaming big is not worth much if you’re not willing to sweep the floor. That’s how the world is changed, evidently. John Eldredge says that “a man’s life becomes an adventure when he releases control in exchange for the recovery of the dreams in his heart.” What God desperately desires for his mighty men is that they would recognise their freedom and their duty to dream. It will set the church ablaze! Dreams will guide us into adventure, and the ultimate adventure into which we are called is an exploration into the heart of God. Of that much I am certain! It is a treasure of unmatchable worth. In the reckless adventure of a life spent with God discovery is never satisfied. Exploration is unending, even into eternity. Like the words of Newton’s anthem (which I’m positive will be in heaven’s hymn book):

“When we’ve been there ten thousand years

Bright shining as the sun

We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise

Than when we’d first begun.”

One taste of the limitless love of God and your soul is never satisfied until it lays a hold of more. Like Columbus, your dream becomes an adventure, and as adventure gives birth to discovery you will not rest until you discover more. Like Columbus, you will have to go back for a second voyage. And a third. And a fourth. I’m following Jesus to Africa because my heart aches for the adventure of a life spent with God. I hope that I’ll discover his compassion, his love, his power and his big, big dreams for Africa. More than anything I hope that I will go deeper into his heart. It is the ultimate adventure, because the heart of God is a land many have discovered, some have explored, few have inhabited and none have conquered.