If you asked me as a 10-year-old what I wanted to do when I grew up, I would have told you that I ‘wanted to buy the old Narrabri hospital and turn it into an orphanage for 100 kids.’   In fact that was my first essay, and the first thing that my sisters told my boyfriend.  ‘Hey, did you know Lizzy wants a hundred kids?’   Yeh, thanks a lot.

I’ve always like the ‘idea’ of many children and pure organisation.  I was the girl who had about 30 barbie dolls set up as an orphanage like Miss Clavell on the classic Madeline.  Each doll had a cupboard and bed, cup and plate.  I hand sewed them each school dresses, made them little schools books, set them up to learn at little desks each day. . .  you get the idea, I still remember each of their names.

I’m learning there is so much more to children and an orphanage than that.

The thing that stood out to me from The Night the Angels Came was the pure love Chrissie poured out on each abandoned child that came her way during the civil war in Burundi.   The hours of soothing them through the trauma they had experienced, holding them in her arms, some even while they took their last breath.

Does that make your heart ache, and what do you say?   You ask deep questions of yourself, do I love like that?  The same questions that are awakened when you watch The Dropbox, a documentary of a South Korean orphanage for special needs babies or you read Heidi Baker’s ‘Compelled to Love’; her motto Stop for the One.

Often love looks like hard work, long nights, many tears.  Maybe you already know that; probably some more than me.

Have you ever read a book that made you want to go out and buy a couple of copies to give away to whoever happened to be having a birthday soon?  I’ve read a couple of books like that, one was Psalm 91 by Peggy Joyce Ruth, and one was this one, ‘The Night the Angels Came’ by Chrissie Chapman.

English Chrissie Chapman travelled to Burundi as a midwife for a ‘few years’.   Those few years turned into many years of divine connections, healing miracles, encounters with God’s protection and the adoption of many children after the civil war.

I loved reading all the ways God came into different situations and brought healing to so many diseases, illnesses and traumas, and how as God ministered to the traumatised children she adopted, they in turn loved on the new children that presented to her home, and they saw trauma melt away in days not weeks.  He never seemed to do it the same way twice, much like Jesus when He healed.

How God brought the right people at the right time, how twisting, redirected paths led her exactly where she needed to be, and the faith lessons that she shares with us.

And I loved that after finishing this book, I was able to find out how and where she is now, via her home church website.

Have you read any books lately that have deeply encouraged you?  I’d love to hear about them.