If you know me at all, you know of my heart for Camp Men-O-Lan and Crossroads organization. Crossroads is a tiny building located in the rough of Philadelphia that provides a safe, Jesus-centered environment for kids to come after school and in the summer, to keep them off the streets. They send groups of kids to camp every year and in my first summer working there, in 2010, God unveiled my passion for these hard-to-love city kids that I felt so drawn to.
As I stepped foot on the grounds of our new ministry organization, Atin Afrika last week, I felt a warmth. Atin Afrika is a newborn organization for street kids in Lira, Uganda, but it’s unlike anything we’ve seen so far. This place screamed love. This organization doesn’t just provide a bucket of water to do laundry and a meal, sending the kids right back to the streets with just a fuller stomach and cleaner clothes.
Atin Afrika provides a bed and substantial counselors that love them. They have game time every day, playing camp-style games that require them to scream, “say no to sniffing glue” or keep a straight face as you answer “tomato” to every question asked to you. They have chores and responsibilities. They have a house-mama that cooks for them. They are taught basic teachings to ready them to go to school. They are taught the things they need to know to become stabilized and function in society.
When I wasn’t making a fool out of myself (as I was the only one who got picked for almost every game, to do something crazy- shocker :p) during our second visit, I was observing the familiar atmosphere. It hit me that this place vaguely reminded me of Crossroads. Mostly just in the way the kids interacted and how they call the older woman that cooks/cares for them, “Mama”, like Miss Darlene, but it made my heart so full, full of love and passion, the same that I share for Crossroads.
I live for the hope given to the children in this world that need it most. For the children who need love the most. It is for these kinds of kids that my heart burns for. My heart burns for sweet Ladisa; the starving street girl I met at church last month that could not talk to me, but would repeat everything I drew with her, with my lil Pip squeaks and took my plate of food without any hesitation because she was that hungry. My heart burns for the Stella, the mal-nutritious street child, who Madison and I were able to clean with Wet Wipes. My heart burns for Michelle, the young girl God enabled me to stop from crying, and push her on the swing, until my arms literally felt like they were going to fall off.
“But, God, why did you bring me here?” The sinful question that had been tattooed on my mind and heart since the day we got here. “I feel like I have no purpose. I feel like I’m not being a light. I feel like I’m not making a difference. Where are these hopeless people that my heart burns for?”
And just before we left Nairobi to come back to Lira, God spoke to me through someone back home. They told me that I need to change my attitude, because I should find joy alone in the fact that God has brought me here to Uganda. And then it hit me when I remembered this verse in Psalm 32:8, “The Lord says, ‘I will guide you along the best pathway for your life. I will advise you and watch over you.’ ”
How have I allowed myself to fall so deeply into the sin of doubting in my God? Where is my joy in the fact that the Creator of the Universe, of Life, and of me, established the “best pathway of my life” before I was even born, and so delicately placed me here, in Uganda, to serve Him for three months of my life? I’ve allowed Satan to completely distract me and discourage me from finding the joy in the simple things.
And God reminded me through this conversation with this person that it’s not about me. It’s not about what makes me feel used, what makes me feel filled up, it’s not about doing what I love or I feel “called” to do. I am just the servant. I am just the planter. I am just the helper. God is the one who sews the seed that we plant, and He is the One who grows and creates. He takes the small things that I feel like don’t matter at all and He makes them big. And after I realized this, God gave me sight of all of the things that my team and I have done and the importance and bigness of them that I couldn’t see before.
The small things like, drawing with a girl who has never seen markers before, or giving away a plate of food, or painting women’s fingers/toes at the hospital, or playing soccer with a kid who can’t walk, or getting tackled by twenty bratty kids in school uniforms, or having a dance party with the Alpha Staff, or giving an encouraging note to someone on the team, or taking tea with the pastor’s family, or buying a kid who has Malaria a plate of food, or teaching a teenage girl how to make a friendship bracelet, or playing guitar until your fingers bleed, or giving your bread away to the homeless man on the side of the street, or loving on an infant as if it’s your own, or doing all of the finances for the team, or pushing a street kid on a swing, or helping serve tea at church on Sundays, or remembering a kids name when you see them, or making a full out of yourself in front of a dozen street kids, matters.
And that is why God has brought us here.
Ladisa Stella
Michelle
Atin Afrika
