African Children's Choir

At the beginning of April, we found out that the African Children’s Choir was going to be in town. We got to see them a few years ago before we had even considered adopting, and we loved their story and performance. To see them now that Moses was home with us seemed to have even more significance.

My only problem was that Justin was in Palestine for two weeks, we had just put our house up for sale and I was feeling the stress of keeping it spotless for showings. Every spare minute outside of my college classes, I was spending at our church getting ready for our Easter play (I got to play a crotchety old beggar woman). Oh, and my purse was stolen a couple of days before. It had been a long week. The kids and I were exhausted and the thought of taking them all to an evening performance where we would all have to be still and quiet seemed like more than I could handle. Beth, my mother-in-law heard about the concert and how much I wanted to go so she volunteered to go with me. (By the way, kudos to all the single parents out there. The way you juggle everything is amazing!)

If you don’t know about the African Children’s Choir, you should really go to their website www.africanchildrenschoir.com and check them out. It was started in 1984 by Ray Barnett with orphaned and underprivileged children from Uganda. Since that time, they’ve branched out to involving children from 6 East African countries, including Rwanda. Nearly all the children are single or double orphans (meaning they’ve lost one or both parents), and they range in age from 7 to 11 years old. The money they raise while on tour in North America and Europe goes directly back into social and educational programs for children of these countries. Mr. Barnett’s vision is to mold the future of Africa by pouring into its children, and he encourages others to do the same.

Maybe it was my stressed emotional state, but as soon as the lights went down and the choir came running out dressed in traditional African outfits and dancing to African drums, I was fighting back tears. I just kept looking at their beautiful faces and thinking that one of those faces could have belonged to my son in just a few short years. But instead, he was sitting on my lap, grooving to the African rhythms with my hands trying to keep his ever-moving feet from kicking the poor man in front of us. I was filled with such overwhelming emotion; thankfulness that he would never again know the pain of being without his parents, gratitude that God had seen fit to pluck him from the old life of loneliness and placed him with us, and a tremendous sense of awe that Moses is indeed my son.

At the very same time, I was experiencing grief that he would never truly know and experience the beauty of his native culture and homeland. I can’t sing to him in Kinyarwandan or explain all the intricacies of what it means to be a son of Rwanda. I can’t even tell him one thing about his birth parents (that’s another post for another time). All of these feelings were swirling around inside of me during the performance and I spent a good deal of time sniffling and wiping my eyes. One of the last songs before the intermission was “He Knows My Name” and the lyrics say, “He (God) knows my name. He knows my every thought. He knows my name, and He hears me when I call.” It was like God was speaking directly to my heart, “I knew Moses from the very beginning. I revealed his name to Asia before you ever knew him, I designed him to be a Limmer, and my plan for him is good.” [Sidenote: When we first started the adoption process, Asia (then 3 years old) told us her baby brother’s name was Moses. Nearly a year later when we got our referral, his name really was Moses!]

Every orphan has a name. Every orphan has significance, and God hears their cries. I want to be willing to hear them too.