Little Bob

“Princes shall come out of Egypt. Ethiopia shall hurry to stretch out her hands to God.” — Psalm 68:31 (WEB)

Amanda spent eight years in West Africa — far longer than the “trip” she had once been too afraid to take. She arrived weak with fever, buried friends, and worked without much money in a hard place. Early on she learned a lesson that shaped the rest of her time there. She wanted to start a work for local boys and began praying for money, running through a mental list of all the friends back in America who might send some. Weeks passed. No money came. Finally she asked God why, and the answer landed: “You are not trusting in Me, you are trusting in America; you are looking to America for help more than to Me.” She saw it instantly, let go of her American safety net, and told God she would trust him alone — and the help, from unexpected places, began to come.

That set up the story she called simply “How I Came to Take Little Bob.” Amanda had long wanted to raise and educate a boy, but the families she asked would not give up their children, and she had finally given up on the idea. Then in Cape Palmas two little boys used to hang around the gate, and she would share her leftover food with them and talk to them. She grew fond of one especially — Bob. One day, passing by, she stopped to put her hand on his head, and a man standing nearby called out to her. It was Bob’s father, Jack. In broken English he said something Amanda never forgot: “I be fool; I no sabe God. I don’t want my pick’n to be fool all same like myself.” He was asking her to take his son and teach him about God, because he did not want the boy to grow up knowing nothing, the way he felt he had.

Amanda’s honest reaction was reluctance. She was sick and weak, she had no money to support a child, and she knew a small boy would be a lot of work and responsibility. She kept telling Jack no, or not yet, and finally took it to God: “Thou knowest I have no money to support this child... But if Thou dost want me to take him, and wilt make it clear, it will be all right.” The answer came in two lines. First: “Is not Ethiopia stretching out her hands to God?” — a whole continent reaching out. Then, when she protested that she was so weak and did not know what she could do: “You do what you can, and where you leave off, God will raise up somebody to do the rest.” So she took Bob. His parents signed an agreement giving him to her to raise and educate as her own child.

Sit with that last promise, because it is the antidote to a very modern kind of paralysis. Amanda looked at an enormous need — a continent’s worth of children, poverty everywhere, her own weak body — and the size of it was a reason to do nothing. What freed her was not a plan to fix all of it. It was permission to do what she could and trust God with the rest. She did not have to be enough. She had to take the one boy in front of her.

You will feel this too. The problems are gigantic and you are one person with limited time, money, and energy, and it is tempting to conclude that since you cannot fix it, you might as well not start. Amanda’s whole life answers that. A father who bought his children out one at a time. A grandmother who prayed. A washerwoman who took one boy into her own home. None of them could do everything. All of them did what they could — and where they left off, God raised up somebody else to do the rest, including, eventually, a woman who almost stayed home because she was afraid of the sea.

One thing to do: pick one problem too big for you that you actually care about — someone lonely, something broken in your school or town, a need you keep scrolling past. Stop waiting until you can fix all of it. Do the one small thing you actually can do, this week, and trust God to raise up others where you leave off.