He was just a young boy, perhaps ten or eleven. I doubt that he had ever been to school.  He couldn't go.  He wasn't free.  He was "employed", that’s a poor word for it, full-time.  He worked hard too.  Put in many hours.  His job?  He was a guide for a blind beggar.  The problem was, his employer was his father, grandfather, uncle or someone his parents had given him to.  He was unpaid, and required to be the guide, to take the blind man from street corner to street corner, so he might find some generous soul whom he could beg money from.  As I watched, I recognized the employment as (is it fair to say?) a form of slavery. 

             It was in Ghana, West Africa.  I lived there for a few years.  I was walking through town one day when the young boy led the blind beggar-man up to me.  The beggar began singing, his gray opaque eyes staring blankly, seeing nothing.  He held his rough, soiled hands out to me, pleading for some money.  As I watched, my heart broke, not for the blind man, though he was pitiful enough, but for the child.  I thought of the young boy, his child's heart, and what must have been a lonely life.  There were other children playing nearby.  The boy kept looking at them with longing in his eyes.  I could tell he wanted to go and join in.  He wanted to laugh, jump and run.  It was easy to see the desire in his eyes to go and wrestle with the other boys, to play with the abandonment of innocence.  He wanted to be a child.  He never would get the chance.

             When you live in a foreign country you will see things that will just break your heart.  You want so desperately to do something about it.  You think and think how you might work at it so the situation changes.  And the more you think the more your frustration rises.  Finally, you discover, and decide, that there is little that can, or even should be done to change many of the things you will see in foreign lands.  It doesn’t matter that we don’t do it that way, or that it would never be allowed in America.  What works in the States, and what we feel is right in the States matters very little to those who have to live in their land.

             Through Isaiah the prophet, God said, "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” 55:8.  In much the same way, the ways of Americans going to live abroad are not the ways of the peoples among whom they might live.  We have to be very careful not to try to “Americanize” for that is not our business.  Our great task is to “EVANGELIZE!”

“Go ye therefore and make disciples . . .”  

Josiah Tilton