A snicker filtered through the crowd as an old man made his way to the front.
He was picking up a free New Testament from a Send Relief table, but everyone in the village knew he couldn’t read.
The small hamlet was only accessible by river, which was riddled with litter and barely navigable after back-to-back hurricanes devastated the community.
Some homes were completely flattened. Others were missing roofs or doors and windows. The village water wells had been contaminated, and many families were going to bed hungry every night, cut off from the fields of crops they’d fought so hard to nurture over the last season—crops that were likely destroyed anyway.
When a team of Send Relief partners arrived, they brought 400 emergency food boxes filled with beans, rice, cooking oil and necessities like mosquito nets and clean water filters—along with several hundred copies of the New Testament.
Though the old man drew looks of ridicule and laughter as he received his box and Bible, he slowly turned to face his neighbors and responded with a smile, “My granddaughter knows how to read. She can read this to me.”
This is how it begins—the faith of one man pushing back on seemingly insurmountable odds in order to know the Word of God, the faith of a group of pastors and volunteers navigating a dangerous river to deliver food, relief and hope to a remote and forgotten community, the faith of donors like you who invest in strangers you may never meet on this side of heaven.
Thanks to you, this elderly man can fall asleep with food in his stomach and a Bible in his hands.
Published February 9, 2023