I want to talk with you a little bit more about why I’m going to Africa. My life might seem a bit random. First Hong Kong, then the west coast, then a quick jaunt to Africa . . . Haiti, now Africa again, and I don’t think that’s even the whole list. Is there any sort of common thread - any ultimate purpose - running through this?
There is.
It started ten years ago. I was sitting in my bedroom in Hong Kong with an L.M. Montgomery book in my hands when I stumbled across my vision of the perfect home life. Orphans coming and going, game nights, music, books, sunsets, study, family, prayer.
That’s it, I thought. That’s what I want to do with my life.
Well, it was a fiction story, so I couldn’t just run over to the house and see what it looked like. And even here, ten years later, I haven’t found it. I’ve seen something close a few times, but in all my travels, I’ve never yet walked into the bright, shining Real Thing.
But, almost without exception, the things that have kept me occupied over the last ten years have been little bits and slivers of this one grand dream. Horse riding lessons with kids. Dramas and costumes and memorizing lines. Singing with a band. VBS in the Rwandan mountains. Scavenger hunts. Teaching. Art projects.
And then a few months ago, I watched one of Hollywood’s films where part of the story line followed the life of a child soldier. A boy forcibly taken from his family, drugged, indoctrinated, and taught to kill. And even all of Hollywood’s make-up and drama couldn’t disguise the truth. The truth that this young paid actor on the screen who was doing a marvelous job of acting like he was on drugs, was playing the part of a real child.
A child whose name I don’t know. A child whose face I haven’t seen. I child I want to go find.
I’ve read how the world looks at these kids. “That’s awful! Unpardonable! How dare they! Don’t they know they’re just children?” And then they do their best to free them, clothe them, psychoanalyze them, counsel them, sew them up, and send their success stories out into their communities. Still just as lost to Christ as they were while they carried a gun.
I’ve heard how Christians look at these kids. “That’s one of the worst things I’ve ever heard. So, this is what people do without God . . . I wonder if kids who’ve been through that can ever really get over it?” We have a hard enough time raising our own kids right. Never mind a kid whose been so traumatized, he doesn’t even think before pulling a trigger in a stranger’s face.
This trip I’m taking to Kenya and Uganda is my first chance to meet some of these kids face to face. I hope it’s not my last. If we don’t reach out to kids who have been closer to hell than we’ll ever be . . . if we don’t tell them about the love of God that casts our sins as far as the east is from the west . . . if we don’t present to them the truth of Jesus Christ . . . who will?
