the A* Team: Life-Changing Mission.

I have turned my blog over to a beloved friend, Christy Farhar. Christy has a beautiful mission...I'm marveling at how God is using her to bring freedom to children a whole world away! Read her story, get involved, make a difference.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Have you ever had a moment when you just knew that the place you stood

was

right

where

you

belonged?

I had that experience in October of 2011. From the moment my feet hit the African soil I knew that was where I belonged. But what I didn’t know was how much of my heart I would leave there and just what God had in store for me.

From the experiences of that trip, and the passion for Africa God had placed in my heart at a young age came the Micah 6:8 Project. This project is a branch of Matthew 25 Ministries that my friend Stephanie McCandless and I founded.

The photo above is Lake Volta; it is the largest man-made lake in the world. This lake enslaves around 7,000 children aging from 3-18. Because the Volta Region in Ghana, West Africa doesn’t have a lot of industry people have turned to fishing. Because of the need to feed other children parents often sell some of their children to slave masters. Many times not knowing just exactly what that child will have to endure.

This fact is hard for us, as Americans, to wrap our minds around. Simply because we have never been desperate enough to be in the situations many find themselves faced with in Ghana. People have said slavery to be all about money but I believe it is about more than that; I believe it is about poverty. My friend, kindred twin spirit, and partner in this mission and I were talking about this recently as he was in Ghana for a research trip, and he said “It is poverty that drives a woman we met to sell her child for a couple dollars a week (one of the few who ever sees her children again) in the hopes of being able to feed her other children. It is poverty that causes a man to enslave another’s children so that his own children can go to school with the hopes of some day having more.”

These pictures cause a great chasm in my heart that threatens to explode at any moment. Just when I think my heart can’t handle anymore the faces slip in the crevices and stay lodged deep in there, where there isn’t an hour that goes by that I don’t ache to rescue those precious brown faces off that dreaded lake.

The above 2 faces are of children that have been rescued from a life of pain, hunger, and hurt. The bottom one, my William. The moment I laid eyes on him my heart was forever gone. I left much of it in Africa when I returned home, much of it in the care of that precious boy who calls me mom and the few chances I get to Skype with him asks me when I am coming back and how beautiful I am.

It is in those moments when I have no doubt the calling God placed on my life for Africa. I look at those pictures that Chris took and I speak aloud to each child “I will come for you”, and I will.

We will be traveling back to Ghana this November, which is about seven months sooner than planned. We will be guests of a Hungarian man who has had a passion for Ghana for twenty years but cannot run a full time facility there. In what can only be told as God working in mighty ways, we have been introduced to him, sat down and shared our hearts and planned a trip.

We are looking for 10 acres of land to buy.

He has 10 acres of land to give away.

This project is so much bigger than me, my family, the committee and Matthew 25 Ministries but I serve a God that is so much bigger than anything I can ever dream or imagine and He tells me:

“The Spirit of the Lord God is upon Me,
Because the Lord has anointed Me
To preach good tidings to the poor;
He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted,
To proclaim liberty to the captives,
And the opening of the prison to those who are bound;
To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord,
And the day of vengeance of our God;
To comfort all who mourn,
To console those who mourn in Zion,
To give them beauty for ashes,
The oil of joy for mourning,
The garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness;
That they may be called trees of righteousness,
The planting of the Lord, that He may be glorified.”