The boy who lives under my roof came to me the way the most important things often do: through a door I did not know was about to open.
His name is Ronald. To tell you how he came to this church home, I have to tell you about the man who brought him: his father, Guma.
Guma came to us from Goma, across the border in eastern Congo, a father with three children and no wife beside him. That region has a way of emptying families toward us, and this church in Mityana had learned to make room.
He arrived carrying more than a person should have to hold: three small children and the weight of whatever he had left behind. The mother never came. He did not speak much of her, and we did not press. Some griefs a man sets down slowly, if he sets them down at all.
For a while Guma was simply a father among us, a man of forty-nine, tired and watchful and trying, asking only that his children be fed, and safe, and known. So, we gave what a church can give. A place to sit. A meal. Names remembered. Hands to help carry the little ones when his own were full.
Ronald was one of those little ones. I did not yet know that this small boy would become mine to raise. To me, then, he was simply Guma's child, one more face at the table, one more name to learn. And for a season, that was all it needed to be. Guma was here, his children were near him, and life went on in the ordinary way.
Then he became ill.
A Father’s Final Act of Love
It was HIV, and it moved without mercy. From the time we understood he was sick to the day we buried him was six months, no more. I watched a man of forty-nine grow weaker week by week, and I watched something else happen alongside it, quieter and harder to bear: I watched a father use the little time he had left to decide who would raise his children. Because that is what those six months were.
Guma was not taken suddenly. He was given just enough time to look around this church, at these ordinary people who had set out meals and learned his children's names, and to make the hardest judgment a parent can make: these are the ones I trust to catch them when I am gone. He chose us. And then, six months after the illness came, he died among us.
I have sat with many people as they left this world, and I will tell you: the peace a man finds when he believes his children are safe is a holy thing to witness. Guma died having made his choice and seen it honored. That is how Ronald came to us, not through paperwork, and not by accident, but through a dying father's deliberate act of trust.
A Family Ready to Welcome Him
So, we caught them. There was no institution to hand them to. There were three children and a church, and we did what a family does when it is torn: we divided the weight among us. Two were taken into the homes of church members, received not as a burden but as a son, as a daughter.
And Ronald stayed with me.
More than Shelter. A Place to Belong.
That is how a boy from Goma, who arrived as one small face among his father's three, became a child I greet every morning. He is not passing through or waiting to be placed somewhere else. He wakes up under this roof, folded into the ordinary life of this home: meals, mornings, chores, the small routines that tell a child he belongs somewhere.
A man crossed a border with everything he had left in the world, handed it to us, and died, and his son is not lost. His son is home.
I did not save him. I opened a door and set out a meal, and God did the rest, as He always does. It is the Lord who carries a child across a border and sets him in a family, the Lord who takes what a grave should have swallowed and lets it grow up instead.
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