Give And It Will Come Back To You

In one of the most remarkable news items I’ve come across in a while, a sick African child receives an unexpected operation.

Mantaine Minis, 6, was living in a hut in a remote village in Kenya, in need of lifesaving heart surgery, when the improbable happened one day in June. A group of students and parents from the Langley School in McLean was on safari at the Masai Mara National Reserve, where Mantaine’s father is a game warden.

That’s when someone from the village told a Langley teacher about Mantaine’s heart problem. From there, things seemed to unfold quickly.

The teacher, Joseph Lekuton, knew that one of the parents was a Fairfax County heart surgeon. He also knew that people of the Masai village, who didn’t own much, had sold 14 cows last year to raise money to donate to relief efforts in the United States after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

So he helped launch a campfire discussion about the Masai gift and about what a group of people from an American suburb could do to return a kindness.

I’ll let you read the rest of the story on your own, so I’ll close by quoting Jesus in Luke 6.38: If you give, you will receive. Your gift will return to you in full measure, pressed down, shaken together to make room for more, and running over. Whatever measure you use in giving–large or small–it will be used to measure what is given back to you.