When I met her in the slums of Mathare Valley, I knew Maureen was special. I watched her march into the heart of hell in her crisp, white satin blouse and heeled shoes and I didn’t doubt for a minute that she’d been rescued from poverty.
But I didn’t know that God would bind our hearts and our lives in such an unbelievable way. Just four short months after meeting in Kenya, our family drove to meet Maureen at a Student Life Camp while on vacation last week. Compassion and Student Life partner with the goal of child sponsorship and they invited her to the United States this summer to travel from camp to camp sharing her amazing testimony (and thousands of precious kids have been sponsored with Maureen’s help!)
Through Facebook and email, we have become dear friends. But I wanted my family to meet Maureen. They fell in love with her and understood immediately why I fell in love with her and Africa.
We spent 2 glorious days together, eating pancakes and bacon in our RV, italian food for dinner and a late shopping trip to WalMart. Maureen taught us a bit of Swahili, we taught her how to eat sunflower seeds. She called my children her siblings. She referred to me as Mom and we exchanged necklaces. She called my husband Dad. And I cried when I learned that this was her first hug from a “father”:
We laughed and prayed and enjoyed rich fellowship together with our new daughter.
God is slowly revealing a pretty amazing plan for our lives to be intertwined…
We will meet again.
*Updated to add: Maureen isn’t one of our sponsored children. She is actually about t0 graduate from Compassion’s Leadership Program and will graduating from the University in just a few short months.
