I’d been in churches and been a Christian myself for years and years and then I met an actual Christian. He was leading a team running an orphanage in east Europe. He’d sold his house so that he could start and fund the place and rescue kids from the sewers, prostitution and heroine. The kids there were happy and healthy and played around him like he was some father abraham. He and his team would go out at night to rescue the kids from living in the drains. He told us about an 11 year old boy who he had warned repeatedly (the kids were legally free to leave) and who they had found just a few nights ago dead in a sewer from a drug overdose. He wept bitterly at all the things he thought he could have done better. He was a great big bear of a man, big beard, looked like he should have been a Russian lumberjack or something. What I thought was particularly sweet was him crying didn’t disturb any of the kids happily playing about - they were evidently used to seeing him vulnerable, this gentle giant. From time to time as they played about they’d stand next to him, as if just resting in his protection for a moment before their chase game would carry on. Any child next to him he’d fondly put his hand on their head as he talked to us with tears in his eyes. I have never met a man so humble or who so thoroughly dismantled in an instant what I thought was a ‘good christian life’ in the West.
I’d been in churches and been a Christian myself for years and years and then I met an actual Christian. He was leading a team running an orphanage in east Europe. He’d sold his house so that he could start and fund the place and rescue kids from the sewers, prostitution and heroine. The kids there were happy and healthy and played around him like he was some father abraham. He and his team would go out at night to rescue the kids from living in the drains. He told us about an 11 year old boy who he had warned repeatedly (the kids were legally free to leave) and who they had found just a few nights ago dead in a sewer from a drug overdose. He wept bitterly at all the things he thought he could have done better. He was a great big bear of a man, big beard, looked like he should have been a Russian lumberjack or something. What I thought was particularly sweet was him crying didn’t disturb any of the kids happily playing about - they were evidently used to seeing him vulnerable, this gentle giant. From time to time as they played about they’d stand next to him, as if just resting in his protection for a moment before their chase game would carry on. Any child next to him he’d fondly put his hand on their head as he talked to us with tears in his eyes. I have never met a man so humble or who so thoroughly dismantled in an instant what I thought was a ‘good christian life’ in the West.