Right after the Korean War took place a woman in Korea had gotten pregnant by an American soldier. She gave birth to a little girl. This woman kept her baby and tried her best to raise this child for seven years. But the rejection, the humiliation, the taunting and the harassment that she experienced was too much for her. She abandoned that seven-year-old girl to the streets. For two years the girl lived on the streets. Finally there was a new orphanage that opened up. They took her into the orphanage. Pretty soon word came that a couple from America was going to come to that orphanage and they were going to adopt a little baby boy.
The next week this American man and his wife came. He saw her out of the corner of his eye. She was nine years old but didn’t even weigh thirty pounds. She was a scrawny thing, with worms in her body, lice in her hair, boils all over and was full of scars. But the man came over to her and laid his hand on her face. He was saying, ‘I want this child. This is the child who I want’.”
The hand on her face felt so good and inside she said, ‘Keep that up, don’t let your hand go.’ But nobody had ever showed that kind of affection to her before and she didn’t know how to respond. She yanked his hand off her face, looked up at him and spat at him and ran away. The next day they came back to the orphanage. They understood what was behind that little girl’s hurt, the trauma she had gone through and all the things she had suffered. In spite of her initial rejection of them, they looked at all the children in the orphanage and they went back to that little girl and they said, “We still want this child.” And they adopted her. They raised that child like she was their own. She’s married today and she’s a follower of Jesus Christ.
That little scrawny 9 year old girl with lice, boils and worms, weighing less than 30 pounds, who pulled her hand away, who spat at them, and ran away mattered to that American couple, was valuable to them, and they desired to take her home.
OKAY – what does God want you to do with this story….
Stop hiding because you matter to God. You are valuable to God. And God would like nothing better than to clean you up, give you all the attention you need and take you home.
Start being Christ to the people of this world!
You see, in many ways our world is just one huge orphanage. Full of people – (you work with them, live with them, go to school with them) who need to know that it is safe for them to come out of hiding too. (STEVE MALONE)