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.