When I was a youth and newly saved, I couldn’t wait until the end of each church service. Not so I could rush out the doors, but so I could run to the altar. My pastor, with a passion for souls, gave an invitation every service to come just as you are to the mercy seat.

The altar is where I learned to wait for God, to linger in His Presence, to worship in Spirit and Truth, to be broken and contrite — a heart God won’t despise.

It’s where I offered my life, over and over, as a living sacrifice, met God’s consuming fire, gave myself away and cried out, “Use me, Lord.”

It’s where He broke my heart for His people and the nations. Where I would pray with fervency, “I just want to feed your people. I want to feed hungry children.”

I wanted to fill the bellies of children who truly know hunger. And my belly ached, the depths of me ached, and I wept rivers for hungry children all over the world that I’d never met.

What does a young single child-mama, newly saved, do with such a burden?

She had no idea how or if anything would come of such a prayer. She had no idea what her life would look like. She just knew her life belonged to God.

The long years between that girl and I, almost quenched the fire, and I thought that girl foolish for having any fire at all.

Until. Today.

I remembered that young girl when I saw the babies eating, and I remembered her cry…“I want to feed hungry children.”

Perhaps you would think young babies feeding themselves on cold tile floors would be somehow uncivilized, somehow savage, somehow beneathe us. And perhaps, I would too, if I didn’t trek the red mucky, trash laden byways in the slums nine-hundred of them, here, used to call their home.

If I didn’t see the young boys and girls hauling gallons of water in yellow jugs on their backs, on their heads. If didn’t know they rummaged in the ditches, scavenging for a meal — perhaps the half eaten chicken leg someone dropped on the way — is how they eased their pangs.

If I didn’t know where they came from, I wouldn’t know they were feasting. I wouldn’t know that the shiny tile was holy ground that the house mothers scrubbed in love and sacred service for them, on their hands and knees in the most pure religion, most holy worship in God’s eyes — caring for the orphan.

I watched her eat and the memory of my prayer slipped back into my mind like a match igniting a fire in my heart. I picked up a fork and began to feed her.

I want to give my life for this.

This baby does not to know the pangs of hunger any longer, because she’s been rescued from the most deplorable, unjustifiable, impoverished conditions. Yet, there are multitudes of babies aching from hollow bellies, with burning throats thirsting for clean, life-giving water, and with childhoods waiting to be redeemed.

“There are so many babies that need rescue, but we have no more room, and we cannot take them until we have more room,” Mama Evah, the national partner with World Help at Destiny Village, tells us.

We can build them. We can build them homes.

There will always be more babies like her to rescue. They just need more room. Those unfinished structures behind me in the picture, plus one more will be room enough for 40 more. Help fund the building of the rescue homes!