I traveled far into the countryside of Ethiopia to visit a new partner ministry that rescues abandoned babies. I looked at each of their little faces with their own unique personalities already, and saw God's mercy and grace in their eyes looking back at me. I knew that they shouldn't even be alive. I fed a two week old baby girl that was so small she couldn't figure out how to take a bottle. As she kept refusing the bottle and turning into my chest, the mother in me wanted to scoop her up and give her the comfort and security of a nursing mother that she deserved and longed for. Instead, her reality is that she was found by a farmer, laying abandoned in a field...and she has no mother. Another baby with a personality as bright as the sun was found in a toilet. And another was found thrown over the fence of a High School, bloodied and bruised from the fall. These children are miracles. They are survivors and they don't even realize it yet. These children are a drop in the ocean of orphans in Ethiopia. But to God, each life matters. Each one has a destiny. A future. A hope. I look at my children from Ethiopia in my own home. They were drops in the ocean as well. But, my God, how they will change the world! They have already changed mine.
I spent the night in an orphanage. I slept in a bottom bunk bed in a room filled with girls and three bunk beds lining the walls, some with two girls per bunk. 10 girls lined the floor so that we could sit up and talk through the night. I asked them what their dreams are for their future. EVERY SINGLE one of them had a dream! And EVERY SINGLE one of them tied that dream into helping others in their future. Oh my, how we can all learn from these precious girls! You can see we talked until they couldn't hold their eyes open anymore.
I experienced one night in an orphanage that some of these girls have lived in almost their entire lives. The sounds in the night in a black room filled with children breathing and mumbling in their sleep, the early dawn of a rooster crow and children in other rooms starting to stir and talk, music starting to play in another room, the smell of the bathroom filling the room each time the door is opened because they don't have running water. I woke to a wall right beside me with a picture taped to it of a sponsor family that gives a young girl hope each morning she opens her eyes because she knows someone in the world cares for her. I watched them each dig through their cubby of clothes while pulling things from under the bed to dress themselves. They fixed each other's hair and ate bread and tea for breakfast. We then all walked almost two miles to church where I watched them all worship God and sing from the purest hearts I've ever seen....thanking Him for all their blessings. There are no words. These girls teach me how to love. James 1:27
