Emmanuel

The story that I am about to tell you is the most amazing, unbelievable narrative that I have ever written to you. I can imagine that many of you might have a hard time swallowing the details of the story of Emmanuel. Even our Nigerian co-workers have been taken aback by the history of this precious child.

Pastor Bulus, one of the City Ministries pastors, manages a care center with 10 boys. Recently, he was on an outreach in a remote village. Ambling through a field on the village outskirts, he stumbled upon what he first thought was a log. How shocked he was to find that the object at his feet was the wrecked body of a small boy! Lifting the boy into his arms, he raced into the town in search of help.

Recently, I had a frustrating experience that opened up the opportunity to grab the attention of our boys at Transition House in order to teach them something valuable. The chance to teach came while farming, when they could  see the message with their eyes, feel it with their hands, and hear it with their ears.

At Transition House, we’ve been teaching the boys farming using a method called Farming God’s Way—​you can read about it at http://www.farming-gods-way.org. On this day, we were planting soybeans according to this method. I had given out cups and told the boys how to use them for placing manure in the planting furrows. Now, though, I noticed that the boys had stopped using the measuring cups—they were using their hands instead!

When I first noticed this, I just settled for the way they were doing it. Soon, though, I noticed the manure being spread thinner and thinner. So I asked the boys again to use the cups, but no one seemed to know where they were. This made me angry. I walked down the field looking for the cups in the furrows, but found nothing.

We arrived at the camp to find everyone in a subdued mood. The rain had been pretty bad and some of the tents had failed and a lot of the mattresses were wet. We had to resort to plan B. All the guys were thrown out of their tents to make way for the girls and then the guys had to make do with whatever shelter they could make.  Some re-fashioned the shelters that were there while others went back and slept in the vehicles that were in the village. See the whole story on Matt's blog.