When I was little, my parents were missionaries in Taiwan. There was an orphanage in our town called the Home of God’s Love. The director of this orphanage invited my parents to help them with the church work, since much of their attention was focused on the kids.
From the time I was eleven years old until I was sixteen, the caretaker for the babies, Aunt Bev, taught me to assist her with her work. There wasn’t a place a young teenage girl would rather be than surrounded by babies, so I was eager and willing to help. She always said she admired Mother Theresa, but in my mind, Aunt Bev was an unsung Mother Theresa. She spent sixty years in Taiwan caring for abandoned orphaned children. Many of them have been adopted into families in the States, and many of them were raised at the orphanage, and are now raising their own families in Taiwan.
Aunt Bev prayed like no one I ever heard before. She talked to Jesus like he was in the room with her. I asked her how she managed to love so many babies and let them go over and over again for so many years. She answered, “I pray a lot, I sing a lot, and I cry a lot.”
“Be imitators of God, as beloved children“. Aunt Bev was the poster child of this verse. She imitated Christ. As a child, I looked to her and imitated her. I grew up and went into the mission field as an adult. There were a lot of factors that influenced that decision, but a big one was Aunt Bev’s imitation of Christ.
Who comes to mind when you think of being Christ-like? Is someone thinking of you when they think of what it means to be Christ-like?
