God Sent Grace By Mark J. H. Klassen | UGANDA
“It started in my wife’s heart,” said Robert Mponye about the ministry to vulnerable children that he and his wife, Esther, began several years ago in their home country of Uganda. “She was an orphan herself.” When Esther was thirteen, her father passed away. Her mother and her extended family couldn’t care for her, so they discarded her. “They threw her away,” Robert said, recalling his wife’s tragic story. “And so she lived with this sense of rejection.” Two years later, at the age of fifteen, Esther met Jesus and her life was transformed. She was immediately given a heart to serve others, especially children who had been rejected. When Robert and Esther met and got married in 2000, they had a dream together of caring for orphaned children. “We knew we wanted to take them into our arms and love them,” said Robert, “but we didn’t know where to begin.”
Together they rescued Grace and brought her to the local hospital where doctors immediately went to work on her, to remove the filth from her eyes and mouth, and to give her the medication she needed to survive. But once the doctors saw that Grace would live, they didn’t know what to do with her next. At that point, one of Robert and Esther’s children heard about the incident and came home to tell their mother about the baby who had no one to take care of her. “At the time, I was on a ministry trip in another part of the country,” said Robert, “Esther called and said, ‘There is a baby in the hospital who I feel the Lord is asking me to bring into our house.’ I responded, ‘If the Lord is speaking, then let’s obey.’” For Robert and Esther, that was the beginning. They took Grace into their small house and cared for her like she was one of their own. When Grace was five years old, the
Then God sent Grace into their lives. Grace was a baby who was born to a mother who didn’t want her. On the day of her birth, Grace was wrapped in a plastic bag and thrown into a public toilet.
On the day of her birth, Grace was wrapped in a plastic bag and thrown into a public toilet. Fortunately, the bag ripped as it tumbled into the toilet and Grace was able to keep breathing. The next morning, at 5:30 AM, a woman came to use the toilet and heard a baby crying. She called for help and people came running.
4 | witness
Grace in 2020
