She hoists her small body to see through the bars of the heavy gate and I hear her calling to me, “Sir, sir! Please give me some food.” When I look up, her frantic gaze meets mine.
Then she is gone.
A moment later, petite black hands grip the rusty bars of the blue painted gate and her face, shiny with sweat, appears again. “I’m so hungry, and God will bless you,” she tells me in her native language, and I don’t need to translate this in my head because I’ve heard it a thousand times.
Walking over to the gate, she lowers herself back to the ground and I notice she must not be more than six years old so I ask, “Where are your parents?”
“They are at home,” she replies, and steps back, head low as she stares at her feet, because the white man before her is really talking to her, little her and she can hardly believe it. “They are hungry too,” she offers as an after thought.
I’ve also seen this scene a thousand times.
“I will follow you to your house,” I tell her, and she nods nervously. So we walk, not like we would in America side by side, but how we do in Ghana, with her in the front, leading me. We pass the “football” field where I play soccer with the local boys and I smile as I think how they all argue about which team I get to be on, not because I’m a good player, oh no, but because they like to watch me run. She tugs on my hand as we near a small compound of huts on the other side of the village.
“My mother is inside,” she says and I call out a greeting asking permission to see her.
A lady emerges, squinting into the bright sunlight and instantly, I know her. I have seen her a few times in our small church, but she has always left before the service was over.
“I knew you come,” she tells me in broken English. “I tell my daughta she call you and you would come.” I notice the tired look, the sunken cheeks, and I know it is true.
There has been very little food in their stomachs for days.
“Where is your husband?” I ask her and she looks at me, almost through me, as she searches my face. “He too afraid to call you. He is inside, but alone for shame.”
“I want to buy you some food,” I nod at the small kiosk down the road, “I will be right back.”
When I return, hands filled with two loaves of sweet bread and a yam, a man is standing there and again, I am startled to realize I know him… Quite well, actually. He had attended church faithfully for over two years and had given his heart to God. “It is stories like that man’s that bring me to Africa,” my dad says as he tells a fellow missionary what a beautiful work the Lord is doing in our small village.
With shaking hands, he takes from me the food. Silently, he empties my arms, one item at a time, almost in reverence. Glancing up, tears spill from his eyes, “You bring me peace in the name of Jesus. And now you bring me food. It is too much…” and he is overcome, shifting from one foot to the other, unsure of how to express his gratitude.
I don’t know what to say.
So I reach for him, grasping his hands in mine, but he pulls me closer until black skin becomes white and white skin becomes black, and we are one together. As he continues to whisper in my ear, “It is too much… it is too much.”
There is a famine the wide world over.
A thirst and hunger in hearts of men.
A million captives today are longing
To be free from the curse of sin.
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I remember this incident in Ghana, a world away, as I and my family prepare for the upcoming winter. We have enough. More than enough, actually. So as I work, I silently pray for those with less. As Ann Voskamp says, “I travel the world on my knees.” 
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