I have a heart friend named David Arcos. Every time we’re together, this one-of-a-kind worshipper of God makes my heart sing. He helps me to celebrate the creative spirit, and he inspires me with his passion to serve orphans in Zambia. David is attempting to do the impossible. He lives with a God-sized dream of rebuilding a village for orphans whose lives have been decimated. As David talks about these children, his soul is alive with hope. As you read, allow your heart to be drawn into what he sees …
Running to Stand On Mountains
By David Arcos
The shouting. I think I’m gonna miss that the most. The desperate, heart-felt, thankful shouting to God coming from the throats of orphans. They remember what life was like. Rachel said it best when she compared her life in the partly built children’s village with her living hell just a year ago, “We were the parents and now we are the babies.” Children were handed children to care for while their parents died.
Peddling sex was the only way for many of these girls to make an existence. Now they sing about being rescued … home-spun poetic tunes call to memory their stories of redemption. They are still children, and yet have endured more than a lifetimes worth of pain. Challenge and struggle has aged them. Crying is a luxury they are learning to experience again.
A young boy named Joseph described to me how his grandfather, a family shaman, would “drown him in his dreams” before Bishop and Busa Ted stopped the shaman with the power of prayer.
Joseph shouts to heaven with the passion for life. He runs with no shoes on the rugged earth. These orphans, together, trained to run a race that we hoped would gain them the completion of their village with a school, clinic, church, and a future.
And why not?
Why couldn’t 30 orphans who had already been immersed in hell stand up, turn around and prove to the nations that with the power of God pulsing in their veins, nothing can hinder them from running, sprinting, lasting, pursuing, seeking, struggling, rising, and soaring into an impossible future. Their shouts are heard. They drift across the Atlantic. Their strength makes us believe. In the middle of all that darkness, Africa is being stirred by a shout of the fury of faith. This shout fills the sky. It is a declaration of victory, an assertion that they know where they’ve come from and who they are. May our soft prayers turn to shouting too! Why not?
“Sing to Him a new song; play skillfully, and shout for joy!” Psalm 33:3
To help support orphans in Zambia, please contact David Arcos.