Heidi Baker: Compelled By Love

Heidi Baker  has made it her life’s work to help the people of Mozambique, the poorest country in the world. She and her husband Rolland founded Iris Ministries, whose orphanages are home to thousands of children.  Heidi Baker  has seen food multiplied just like the loaves and fishes in the Bible. She’s also seen the sick healed and people raised from the dead.

SIMISOLA: Heidi, thank you so much for joining us on Turning Point.

HEIDI BAKER : Thank you, it’s good to be with you.

SIMISOLA: In 1995, God called you to Mozambique, and He called you to the broken and the poor, one of the poorest nations in the world. What struck me in your book, “Compelled by Love,” is you wrote here, “We came to some of the most grief-stricken, suffering people we could find in the world. A population that had suffered decades of war, disease and oppression. And we came to learn from them about the kingdom of God.” My question is, what did they teach you?

HEIDI BAKER : They taught me about desperation. They taught me about hunger, dependence, humility. I thought I knew something of the kingdom, years ago I was preaching to the multitudes and God spoke to me to stop and sit with the poor, and then stop and sit with the children. And the kingdom of God breaks forth for the poor and the kingdom breaks forth for the children. So there sitting in the dirt with the most broken people on the planet, I learned what it was to be poor in spirit.

SIMISOLA: And I know here you talk about children and how they are your and they teach you about the kingdom.

HEIDI BAKER : Yeah, just watching children who previously were dying, you know in a village or under a bridge, in a dumpster, wherever. And watching how they’re transformed by love, and then they start stopping for someone else.

One of my favorite stories is a little girl named Beatrice and she changed my life forever. This little girl was dying, she was raped, she had a deformed face, scabies, lice, bloated belly, the whole picture. And I looked at her and I just said, “Oh.” I saw beauty in her, and her eyes were bright red, like red from blood red, and there were flies stuck to them, and when I looked her in the eyes, “woaaah,” Jesus just looked right back at me. I saw Him. Whatsoever you do to the least of these my brothers, you do unto me.

And then I watched as God healed her and her face became shiny and bright and it took months. I mean she was in hospital, she was malnourished she was broken. But she stopped for the most desperate child on the base, the most desperate one. This little girl curled up in a ball in front of our bakery stairs, this little tiny girl, and she just held her. The same thing that we had done for her, she did for this little girl.

SIMISOLA: Wow. So it’s the revolution of love: you love one, they love another. That is so beautiful.

HEIDI BAKER : Yes, and it just multiplies. The gospel is simple. Will we be the hands of Jesus, each one of us? And Beatrice taught me how to love.

SIMISOLA: I know you take in children, everyone who comes. Like, you have over ten thousand in your care.

HEIDI BAKER : Yeah, hundreds and hundreds of them. I’m just one of the people working there but, yeah, hundreds of us take in broken, hungry dying children.

SIMISOLA: And tell us, I know I read where Jesus came to you in a dream or a vision where He said, “There’s always enough.”

HEIDI BAKER : Yeah.

SIMISOLA: Can you tell us about that?

HEIDI BAKER : That changed my life. Actually, I was very tired because  the government was in transition and we had 320 kids living with us in a children’s village that they had released to us, and suddenly we were just exhausted because there was so much turmoil. So I was on my face praying and the Lord Jesus came to me and He showed me a multitude and I knew I couldn’t count them, but hundreds of thousands. And I started screaming, “No, No!” Because I was already tired with 320. “NO!” And then He looked at me, those eyes of passion, you know, the eyes of Jesus when He looks at you, and these burning eyes of love. And He said, “I died that there would always be enough.”

And since that day we have said yes to every single child. We’ve taken every single child that’s alone or abandoned or broken. All of us, hundreds of us, we just said yes to all of them.

SIMISOLA: Wow.  Can you tell us, for people who want to touch the poor and the forgotten — where can they start?

HEIDI BAKER : I believe that it’s like the story of the Good Samaritan, the Lord wants each one of us to stop for the one. We’ve complicated the gospel, we’ve made it confusing and we want to just bless somebody else, or send a check but God is saying, “I want you to feel my heart, and I want you to look at one person every day, stop for them.  Let my compassion touch you.” That’s what the suffering is, to feel what God feels for a suffering life, for a broken child, for somebody under a bridge. Maybe someone who is wealthy wearing beautiful clothes, they may be somebody in disguise. But God has called us to be His hands and His feet and His eyes and His mouth. So we are called to stop for the one, every one of us, everyday.

< http://www.irismin.org/>