It took 30 hours of travel door-to-door. I walked through the door of the hotel room where we are staying in Uganda, just before midnight on Thursday. By the time I got settled, I had only a couple of hours to sleep before it was time to wake for the morning.

Though exhausted, I gave myself some margin so I had time to meet God. I was both excited and desperate to connect with Him, the Vine, knowing apart from Him, I can do nothing.

I know I can’t do everything, but I didn’t come to Africa to do nothing.

The first thing I noticed, when I stepped out on the small balcony, was the smell of the air. It was so different than home. All of what my senses were taking in, the skyline, the landscape, the sounds, were all so different.

Yet, what I was certain of at that moment was God is the same. I could feel Him here. I could feel His love for His people. He had a question for me, one that He’s been asking every time I sit in His Presence.

“You know my love for you. Will you see my love for them, too? Those who don’t Me yet know? Will you see them, will you touch them, will you let My love for them move you?”

When you know God’s love for His people, you cannot help but be moved by it.

After breakfast, the hospital was the first place we visited.

There were mamas with their babies, for their babies. I noticed one mama in the corner holding her tiny son. He looked no more than a month old. I kneeled so she could hear me ask, “How old is your baby?”

“Nine months old,” she softly replied.

I could not believe how his tiny frame concealed his age. Though, usually nervous, this time it wasn’t about me. Without hesitation I asked, “May I pray for you and your baby?”

I felt God’s love for her as I we laid hands and cried our prayers for his healing.

The next stop was to Katwe slums, the second largest in Africa.

In these slums, five-hundred thousand people try to make their homes. The conditions are deplorable, though you wouldn’t know it by the joy the children have.

And, I was most astounded by my own joy in the moments I had to love these children, to touch them, to embrace them, to hug them long, to hug them tight. With each touch I prayed it was Jesus they felt, that it was His love that poured through.

Before I would have been content to see through my camera lens, while others touched the children. And not because I was afraid of their dirt, but of my own helplessness to make their lives better. But, God’s not asking me to fix all that’s wrong. Just to touch them. Just to love them. Just to let God love them through me. And the more I chose the latter, the more hope I had for their lives, the more faith I had to believe God to raise them up making beauty from ashes.

The more I realized, though God doesn’t have to use His people to touch a hurting and dying world, He chooses to, and desires to.

Jesus walked the dusty roads and the muddy banks and went into homes and touched the people. We must go like He went to touch the people, the ones you meet in your everyday. Be moved with compassion, because of His love for them. Because, His love for us is not to keep for ourselves.

At dinner the first night, I sat there with rest of the group at the table listening to Vernon Brewer, the man who started World Help, tell his story about how he began.

His first time in Africa, twenty-seven years ago, there was a little girl he encountered in an impoverished grass hut village. He shrank back from touching her when he saw her unhygienic condition.

He knew it was wrong in the moment he did, and God’s Spirit confirmed it to him. “I love that little girl just as much as I love your little girls back home. I commanded you to love that little girl. And I love her so much, my Son died for that little girl.”

And moved with compassion, he reached out and embraced that little girl.

He discovered, that village’s greatest need was a deep well — clean water. Vernon promised to help build them a deep well. And what began as a touch, turned into 4 deep borewells, a clinic, a school that was also a church…

and World Help.

Vernon continued talking to the team, “That’s how I began, twenty-seven years ago. Providing clean water, building wells, building churches, building schools, helping hurting people. And now, twenty-seven years later you are part of that story…”

You can be, too.

You see, there is also a place, Destiny’s Children Home, here in Uganda run by a woman who’s name means life, Eva. She is being the hands and feet of Jesus to bring hope and new life to the children of these slums. Out of the 1,700 children provided for at Destiny’s Children Home, nine-hundred came from the Katwe slums.

They are making room for more, for babies that need rescuing, room to receive more babies who have been abandoned.

World Help is partnering with Destiny’s Children Home to help finish the construction of a third baby dorm that will have room for ten more babies.  And it’s why we are here in Africa, we are helping to raise funds to finish building baby the rescue home.

To learn more about Phase 1 of the Rescue home project by clicking here.

You can also join the rescue by sharing about it.