Justice for Maurice’s children

 

And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?’ (Luke 18:7-8)

There is a cry in the heart of God, a cry for understanding, a yearning for us to know and finally realize the One who is Love seeks justice for us and for every beloved thing God has made.

Justice is not what most imagine. It is not retribution or punishment for wronging. It is the union of God’s desire with material reality. It is human hearts and our broken creation existing in oneness with the Infinite Love from whom all creation springs, an ever-flowing stream of life.

In other words, justice is you, Holy One. It is knowing you, being encompassed, enveloped and inseparably one with the Love you are. It is to know oneself inside, wrapped and rapt within the enveloping cloud, the encircling arms of your great love, delighting and treasuring us as we do our children, our grandchildren, our little ones and all those souls who loved and blessed us in ways and for reasons we never fully understand.

Today, I want this justice for Maurice’s children. They are not his children, except as his heart has adopted them in their crying need. He understands their hearts and hopes because he was once one of them, as when I first met him 30 years ago in a refugee camp in what was then southern Sudan.

He was a teenager, displaced and separated from his family by war and hunger as he would be for many years. Unable to go home, with no money and little to do, he approached a visiting journalist and asked if he could help. For the next few days, Maurice was my interpreter. In the following years, several of us supported him through boarding school and an agricultural college. We stayed in touch on and off, until now when our correspondence is very much on.

Southern Sudan is now South Sudan, an independent nation, and Maurice is back in Juba where he was a boy, working among orphans and vulnerable children with insecure food supplies and little chance at an education. Children like the child he was.

He provides food, safety and basic education, making do with meager resources, knowing what the justice of God is for children like these. It is to know the enfolding arms of love, to feel the goodness of warm food in their stomachs, to joy in the wonder of learning and to smile as they plant seeds in the ground that will produce a harvest of hope.

The Green Foods Enterprise is the name of Maurice’s nascent organization. It is one small but irreplaceable expression of God’s justice for invisible and forgotten souls, who cry out day and night hoping to be heard. Maurice hears first-hand and has invited me in this holy work. Perhaps you hear this invitation, too. If so, let me know. Justice for the children can use all the help it can get.

David L. Miller