A Cry for Help
On the surface this is just another cheap prayer card, such as you could find in churches and Christian shops around the world. But this particular card is more than that. It is one man’s cry for help and for me a life changing moment.
A man appeared suddenly out of the crowd and pressed this card into my hands. Chidi had lost his family in their flight from the Sudan. He had no idea if his wife or three young children were still alive. He hoped that he could make enough money to go back and find them and, hopefully, even bring them all to Europe or America to start a new life. I agreed to pray for him and he vanished back into the crowd. I never saw him again.
I was ten years old and it was the first time that I became aware that there was wrongness in the world, that peopled suffered not just from mistakes they made or natural disasters, but from the injustice of others. I was not a sheltered child. I had played with dalit children in India and with poor kids in Cairo. But even Miriam, who had only one dress and scrounged in the garbage for scraps, laughed and played and fed feral kittens with me and seemed happy.
Chidi was an adult asking for my help. I remember thinking “What could I do?” But all he wanted was for me to pray for him, and that, I could do.