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Today, We Face Our Worst Times with an Insane Hope. *Warning* Graphic Images!

Eight years ago, a friend of mine and Milton’s, who is a director for Voice of the Martyrs, said to me, “Kimberly, what you’re doing to protect children from human trafficking is wonderful, but if you really want to help the most vulnerable women and children, you’ll go to Sudan.”

I was so afraid, it took me nearly 9 months of pleading with God to “let this cup pass” before I finally submitted to His call for me to go. My life, my husband’s life, the life of Make Way Partners –along with many of you who sacrificially give to support this work—has never been the same.

That first trip into Darfur, I met a little girl, Teresa, whose life—and senseless death—taught many of us that the choices we make in our daily lives really do make a difference, can save lives, and do have the power to usher in our Father’s Kingdom, one child’s life at a time.

It was Teresa’s story that motivated me to spend months in the desert of Darfur working with our first indigenous leader Lual Atak to protect hundreds of orphans from the slave raiders.

But when hyenas killed nearly 280 of our orphans in just 10 months, we caught a tiny glimpse of God’s broken heart and knew we had to do more.  So we launched the most insane campaign of Hope ever imagined—we built the first orphanage in Darfur, Sudan—nearly 2,000 miles of pave-less bush away from our nearest supply chain in Nairobi, Kenya.

These years have been a transformational haven for nearly 600 orphans who—through your love and support—have been consistently loved, fed, sheltered, and educated in the name of Christ.

Through the years, God has brought us other faithful indigenous partners, like Romano Nero. Under Romano’s direction, last year we opened a new orphanage in Southern Sudan, near the border of Uganda.

Here nearly 60 more orphans receive the same love and protection as we offer in Darfur. When I visited in April, it was astounding even to me to see the results of Romano’s labor. Orphans who he’d literally pulled from their mother’s decaying bodies—and who were so malnourished they couldn’t even hold down solid food—were singing, playing, and learning their alphabet!

After eight years of love, toil, danger, and sacrifice, the enemy roars louder today than ever before. As the GOS, or invading Islamic regime of Northern Sudan, rears its ugly head against the July 9^thday of official Southern Sudan independence, they are attacking on every front.

The GOS has sworn that if Southern Sudan pursues independence, their retribution will be harsher than any of their past wars. The reality of their threat is already coming home.

The village where this brutal slaughter took place has no military significance whatsoever. The motivation is none other than terror and genocide, enacted through bombing, rape, and slavery.

The Sudan Tribune reports, “While there are UN troops in the Nuba Mountains they have largely served no purpose. If truth be told, they are actually exacerbating the situation. First, they do little more than largely observe the violence and certainly nothing to attempt to halt it. Second, two sources inside the Nuba Mountains, both of whom must remain unnamed, reported that Egyptian soldiers with the UN were seen raping local women in Kadugli as the latter sought sanctuary from the surrounding violence.

I’ve spent the entire morning in secluded prayer crying out to God for His direction in our response to such evil. “What would you have Your Hands and Feet to do oh Lord?”

First of all, I know that He would not have His Body ignorant. So, as painful as it is, please help us to spread the news of this holocaust that is happening on our watch.

A few years ago, we took our children to visit the Nazi concentration camp of Dachau. They couldn’t believe the stories they read about the Germans claiming to not be aware of the holocaust happening under their noses.

Since then, the world has spent the last six generations pointing our fingers at the Germans. Yet, here we sit not wanting to know what is happening today—in our generation—for the same reason, it is painful to know—and it calls for our response.

I am asking you to speak out, share this story, and inundate your congressman with your demands for US pressure on both the GOS and China, who funds much of this genocide in exchange for oil.

Christ calls us to participate in His suffering, and nothing grieves Him more than oppression upon widows and orphans. This is our opportunity to share in the work of the cross as it hammers against the vilest assault known to mankind, gross profit made at the expense of the defenseless.

Matt McGowen, our Field Coordinator, and I are preparing to return to Sudan in late August with a small American team. You can take part in this journey by helping us raise $150,000 in relief supplies—including food, medicine, tarps, tents, and diesel for the safe transport of people and supplies.

While this effort represents only a small portion of what is needed over the long haul, it will mean the literal difference between life and death today for widows and orphans hiding out in the bush.

A gift as small as $50 will provide a tarp (for shelter) and a month’s supply of food for one widow and her children.

Through these last 8 years, we’ve seen over and over again the difference our presence makes, like with Immanuel. When local police first found this sickly boy, he told them his name was Tong-Tong, which is a local word for LRA, the militia who’d murdered his mother. Locals began calling him Tong-Tong after the LRA left him orphaned.

The police said he was so thin, they didn’t know how he stood upon his stick-like legs. The police took him in, but he couldn’t hold down their food, and they were not able to properly care for him.

When Romano came through, they introduced him to Tong-Tong. Romano brought him into the family of Hope for Sudan, and gave him a new name—Immanuel.

When I visited Hope for Sudan in April, I could barely believe this healthy, happy, affectionate child was the same malnourished boy I’d met through pictures just a few months earlier. The presence of God shot through the gaps of his toothy smile like rays of sunlight breaking through crystal.  

 Recently, Romano took Immanuel to visit his home village. An older sister saw him and called out, “Tong-Tong!”

Immanuel stopped her, “That’s not my name anymore. I am Immanuel.”

Everyone of you who has shared in this wild journey of God to fight for the Fatherless has been drug through the darkness with each of these children, and you’ve shared in indescribable joy as God redeems their brokenness, as He did with Immanuel.

As we once again step out in the same insane hope that fueled us nearly 8 years ago, we languish, we fear, we doubt in our distress, and we cry out in our suffering—“How long, Oh Lord?”, but we do not give up. He has delivered us, and He will deliver us.
Love, your broken sister along the journey,
k

(Source: Today, We Face Our Worst Times with an Insane Hope. *Warning* Graphic Images!)

[T]he very existence of the New Testament Epistles shows us that unhappiness is a condition which does afflict Christian people.  There is in this, therefore, a strange kind of comfort which is nevertheless very real.  If anyone reading my words is in trouble, let me say this: The fact that you are unhappy or troubled is no indication that you are not a Christian; indeed, I would go further and say that if you have never had any trouble in your Christian life I should very much doubt whether you are a Christian at all.  There is such a thing as false peace, there is such a thing as believing delusions.  The whole of the New Testament and the history of the Church throughout the centuries bear eloquent testimony to the fact that this is a ‘fight of faith’, and not to have any troubles in your soul is, therefore, far from being a good sign.  It is, indeed, a serious sign that there is something radically wrong, and there is a very good reason for saying that.  For from the moment we become Christians we become the special objects of the attention of the devil.  As he besieged and attacked our Lord, so does he besiege and attack all the Lord’s people, ‘Count it all joy’, says James, ‘when you meet trials of various kinds’.  That is the way your faith is proved, for not only is it a test of your faith, in a sense it is a proof that you have faith.

-Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure, “That One Sin”

There are others, not so many today, perhaps, as there used to be, whose sole interest in the gospel is their interest in theology and doctrine and metaphysics, and in great problems, arguments and discussions.  I speak of past days; days that are gone.  I do not want to defend them, but they were infinitely preferable to the present position.  There were people then whose only interest in the gospel was their interest in theological problems; and they argued about them and discussed them.  Their minds were very much engaged; this was their intellectual hobby and interest.  But the tragedy was that it stopped at that interest, and their hearts had never been touched.  Not only was there an absence of the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ in their lives but there was often an absence of the ordinary milk of human kindness.  Those men would argue and almost fight about particular doctrines, but they were often hard men to approach.  You would never go to them if you were in trouble; you felt that they would neither understand nor sympathize.  Still worse, the truth they were so interested in was not at all applied to their lives; it was something confined to their studies.  It did not touch their conduct or behaviour at all, but was confined entirely to the mind.  Obviously they were bound, sooner or later, to get into difficulty and to become unhappy.  Have you ever seen a man like that facing the end of his life?  Have you seen him when he can no longer read, or when he is on his death-bed?  I have seen one or two and I do not want to see another.  It is a terrible thing when a man reaches that point when he knows that he must die, and the gospel which he has argued about and reasoned about and even ‘defended’ does not seem to help him because it has never gripped him.  It was just an intellectual hobby.

You know, what he’s describing sounds an awful lot like the blogosphere of today’s world, especially the “Christian” blogosphere.  “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.”  That’s from Ecclesiastes 1:9.

Incidentally, this particular sermon is one of the free sermons that the Martyn Lloyd-Jones recording trust is giving away for free as MP3s.  You can download it and several others at this page.

Summary statement from the video: “Abortion, at any and every stage of pregnancy, kills a rapidly developing, genetically-distinct human being.”

Spiritual Depression is actually a series of twenty-one sermons that Martyn Lloyd-Jones preached in the early 1960s on the subject, and I’d wager that almost anyone could benefit from reading through these sermons.  Lloyd-Jones was one of the best, and I’ve rarely been unchanged from reading his words or hearing him preach.  Not only for that reason, but this is a topic that any honest person will admit that they wrestle with: after all, life is not a constant bed of roses for anyone.

So this morning I returned to the beginning of the book and read through the first chapter/sermon, and thought that I should reproduce one of the final paragraphs from this chapter.  Lloyd-Jones used the King James (or Authorized Version, as he called it, though he wasn’t happy with that fact – that’s what he had to work with at the time), and I’m going to substitute the ESV for the KJV in this quote.  This particular sermon is an exposition of Psalm 42, and when he says “this man” in the following paragraph, he’s referring to the author of this Psalm.

The main art in the matter of spiritual living is to know how to handle yourself.  You have to take yourself in hand, you have to address yourself, preach to yourself, question yourself.  You must say to your soul: “Why are you cast down” — what business have you to be disquieted?  You must turn on yourself, upbraid yourself, condemn yourself, exhort yourself, and say to yourself: “Hope in God” — instead of muttering in this depressed, unhappy way.  And then you must go on to remind yourself of God, Who God is, and what God is and what God has done, and what God has pledged Himself to do.  Then having done that, end on this great note: defy yourself, and defy other people, and defy the devil and the whole world, and say with this man: “I shall yet praise Him for the help of His countenance, who is also the health of my countenance and my God.”