A 100 Person Family

• How do you take a band of 100 orphans or more and turn them into a family?
• How do you teach a motley crew of ragamuffins to be a house of God?
• How do you redeem the ignored causalities of a plague into an incarnational tribe of healers?

I don't know the answers to these questions. At least not on a functional level. I do know that through the power of Spirit I will learn the answers to these questions and others as we attempt to build a sense of family into the "orphan village" in Nsoko, Swaziland.

Here is a blog post by Gary Black, about the Nsoko orphan village, where our family will be moving to serve. This place is a haven of food, education, safety, and family for a group of the fatherless we will partner alongside the Swazi moms to knit into a family.

Dreaming big dreams are great to inspire us and set a goal even if their results are never practically realized. I see these orphan villages as being the redemption point of the disease of AIDS.

AIDS is a blood born disease. AIDS is DEATH in the blood. In the word of God BLOOD is always a symbol of life, "there is life in the blood." (Leviticus 17:14) So this epidemic of death is an attack on God's symbolic life. This attack is devastating. One needs not slide far down the slippery slope facing Swaziland and the rest of the southern African continent to see that a nation of orphans will be a people raised with no authority, no moral structure, and no hope. This disease decimates the people of Swaziland physically and also spiritually and emotionally. The very fabric of faith, the future of hope, and the participation in love ceases to exist as there is no example of these truths modeled and instilled into the kingdom's children.

DEATH and AIDS must be REDEEMED in Swaziland. Satan has used this plague to advance his kingdom. Yet, the Blood of Christ waits to make good what Satan has intended for harm. These orphan villages are redemption. Not in a macro way, not now at least, but in the lives of those who can be touched and can be trained, and can be taught to experience REAL ABUNDANT LIFE in Christ: the end of faith, the end of hope, the end of love that Satan intended through this pandemic of death can be reversed. The redemption of the plague of AIDS is when the causalities of it's consequences become the FAMILY of GOD knit together into a new tribe that will be EMPOWERED to take God to the nations.

That is the vision we hold onto, that is the future we claim, that is the truth we believe, though now it may be only hoped for, and in our lives it may remain unseen, we believe it in faith. God will REDEEM this pandemic of AIDS through fostering in these children a new future, a new family, and a new love!