This is my friend. He, Motherless, Fatherless, without a family. He runs errands, washes clothing, carries loads in exchange for a place to sleep and a bit of food.

He is always the first to greet me. My young shadow. His eyes follow me. I know he is watching, watching and wondering. As we walk he asks me the question, why? Why do I come to visit him? I wait on my words to come, echoing heaven, I turn my eyes to his, and I say the words “because I love you. Because I have a God that loves me so much he led me to you and that same God he loves you more then you will ever know” He waits for more, more balm, more love. I turn him to face the ocean’s roar, I lower my voice near his ears and ask him to feel the wind, the greatness of the ocean, do you feel the power? “Gods love for you is as fierce as the ocean, it is as powerful, and it as grand, I will not always be here, but God will, always, just as this water will always be here.”

He moves on and the moment is lost, and I am lost. Did he get it, did he feel my heartache, my humble love trying to mirror heaven?

Together we hand out food. He helps, tells me his neighbours stories, “she has no husband, three kids,” “she had a stroke,” “these, they have no family” and the stories go on and on and faces and names are placed beside the un-comprehensible statistics. The storyteller has chapter after chapter of horrors, I barely breath when he tells me that after the dark business of night, and the thugs and prostitutes have retired, hundreds of children come and make beds in the sand. I ask another and another for confirmation. The truth rumbles, hurts, I am sick with the thought. And feel powerless. Demobilising powerlessness.

I weep in Roger’s arms. I weep with Heaven.

Is there a way to change all these horrors?

Maybe, but it will take a revolution, a solid resolve, each and every one of us, to fill a place in the barrier against this winning storm.

This Christ Season as you unwrap wealth, will you please, please remember one who is lost. Will you hold your gift tight to your heart and feel its privilege? Will you shed a tear of prayer for one of the numbers in the growing mountain of poverty?

Will you do it for our World? For that Child lost in the shadows of darkness?