In His Name

A single event in time. An event in which the outcome was good in a snapshot in time. A life was saved and a deviation in the course of someone’s life is changed for the better.

But let’s tell a story. The same initial sequence of events with the good being given to the same individual by three different individuals at a single point of intervention.

Story number one: A young boy is born to a single mother in a developing nation. When he is only 3 years old, she loses her battle to AIDS. The boy’s older brother runs away when the food runs out, leaving the young boy with his one-year-old sister. He spends his days wandering the slums looking for food, his crying sister on his hip. Occasionally he finds a well-wisher that is willing to give he and his sister some scraps of food and some water, but he is getting weaker every day and becoming more hopeless and desperate with every setting sun.

Every day his circle gets wider in the stinking slums and the yield is no better, until one fateful day. It was a particularly hot day and the young boy had struggled to keep his tiny sister on his hip where she was tied with a swaddle. He was stumbling down a road when the rare sight of an automobile appeared through a cloud of dust and came to a stop right in front of him. He trembled at the unknown.

A tall, thin woman emerged from the vehicle and walked briskly to the dusty little pair in the road. She stopped abruptly in front of them and kneeled down, removing her sunglasses as she did. She asked the little boy who he was and where he had come from, deep concern in her voice and on her face. She told the little boy that it was her job to help orphans like him and told him that they needed to come with her and that there would be food and water.

This was the day of intervention. The suffering little pair were taken to a Christian children’s home that day. And from that day on, they received love and care, food, medical care, and a warm soft bed. They were given an education and given God’s Word. They were taught the steps to salvation and were very thankful for the home they had been given. They grew to be happy and healthy young adults that were well equipped to break the cycle of poverty.

Story number two: The same little boy and girl. The same sad beginnings and future without hope. The point of intervention: The little boy stood in the same spot on the same dusty road in the same vast and filthy slum. But this time, there was no automobile, but rather a bent, old man limping down the road.

He stopped and knelt in front of the two starving children and reached out and brushed the boy’s face with the tip of a gnarled finger. He asked them where they had come from and when the boy told him, he just nodded and shook his head knowingly.

He took them home with him that day. Home was a tin shack, deep within the slums. He and his wife shared their meager food throughout the years. They loved the children the best they could.

The boy was now grown to a young adult without an education. The old man was dead and the old woman very ill, so the boy hit the streets to provide for them. He started out begging. Then stealing. But one dark and fateful night he was badly beaten and succumbed to his injuries, leaving his sister and the old woman that had cared for them on their own.

Desperate and alone, without an education, his sister hit the streets and started begging like her brother had. But it wasn’t long before she too became a statistic. She married a young man and became pregnant. Her husband would come and go, but rarely did he provide for her. Pregnant and alone, she learned that one thing he had given her was AIDS.

Story number three: The same little boy and girl. The same sad beginnings and future without hope. The point of intervention: The little boy stood in the same spot on the same dusty road in the same vast and filthy slum. The same cloud of dust. The same rare automobile. But when the dust cleared, it wasn’t a tall thin woman, but a man in his early twenties. He drove a black sedan and was dressed all in black and adorned with gold chains around his neck and wrists.

He approached the young boy and his sister and knelt down in front of them. He told them he had a place he could take them where they would be safe and taken care of. Even at the tender age of three, he did not feel safe, but he was desperate.

The young boy and his little sister were fed and clothed. They were given a warm bed to sleep in. But it came at a price. Over the years, as the boy grew, he was taught to beg, steal and deliver drugs. He was in and out of jail and just shy of his eighteenth birthday, he was shot and killed. His little sister was forced into prostitution when she was twelve years old. When she contracted AIDS, she was thrown out on her own. She was pregnant.

Three identical beginnings with three different endings. All children are born innocent, but they require specific things to become all they are meant to be. They need shelter and freedom from fear; they need mentoring and nurturing. They need proper nutrition and medical care. They need unconditional love. They need God’s Word and spiritual instruction and they need education.

There are millions of fatherless children just like those in our story. We are in a race against time because every day that goes by, fatherless children become characters in stories without education, without God’s Word, without love given in His Name.