“A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows, is God in his holy dwelling.”
Psalm 68:5
I went to Caracol, Haiti for the first time when I was 16, a few years before Strong Tower opened. My time in Haiti was beautiful and wonderful and heartbreaking and inspiring and life-changing. My heart turned towards the Haitian people completely. I began to see why God had a special place in His heart and in His Kingdom for the poor and the oppressed.
However, It wasn’t until a couple years ago that God’s heart for the orphan clicked for me. I was sitting at Strong Tower Orphanage with a 5-year-old named Rose-Berline in my lap. At the time, she was new to STO and was still not very healthy because of her time on the street. I started to think about the life she would have lived if not for STO. She would never have gotten proper food and nutrition. She would never have gotten to go to school. She would never have gotten 18 best friends that she could call her sisters. She would have never known the joy, love, and security that comes with being a part of a loving family. She may have never learned about Jesus, who loves her more than anyone in the universe ever could.
Then I started thinking about the origins of Strong Tower, and how God whispered “Haiti” to my mom’s heart years before Rose-Berline was even born. The Creator of universe and Savior of the world loved this one little girl, a little girl that would have otherwise been forgotten, so much that he was putting Strong Tower into motion before her existence. He loved Rose-Berline so much that he was willing to uproot my mom’s life, and the lives of many others after, so that she could have a better life than the one Haiti’s streets have to offer. Jeremiah 29:11 says that God has had plans for Rose-Berline’s life forever: good plans, to give her a hope and a future. How amazing is that?!
And then, I started thinking about how this is what the Father has done for all of us. We are all seemingly insignificant people that are not deserving of His perfect, unconditional love. We all mess up a LOT. But because of His great love for us, He’s given us the right to be called his children. In Him, the fatherless find compassion (Hosea 14:3). Through Jesus, we have been adopted into His glorious kingdom, made co-heirs with Christ, and given His Spirit to mark us as His children forever (Romans 8:14-16). What a good, good God we serve.
What God has done in the lives of the girls at STO is a tangible picture of Jesus redeeming lives, offering hope, and doing more than we could have ever asked or imagined. It is a tangible picture of the lengths that God is willing to go to pursue the “least” of all people. It is a tangible picture of the gospel.