I'm writing this at the beach on an island off the Thai coast. Our debrief is off to a roaring start. Our racers have been in some very rough places and tonight as we prayed over them, I could sense the Spirit fall as the tears began to flow.  Our team of racers had held children orphaned by the cyclone in Myanmar; they had worked hard to get through its police state barriers - the first aid workers in that part of the delta.  A number of our women had ministered to prostitutes in Pattaya, a town that sees two million sex tourists pass through in a year.  And as we prayed, I sensed that the darkness still weighed heavy on their shoulders and in their hearts.  God had been breaking and expanding their hearts with the things that break his own heart.

This concept of expanding hearts is something God has been showing me lately.  The other day I was talking to Jumbo (my main man in Swaziland).  The ministry in Swaziland has grown a lot in the last year or two.  We didn't used to feed orphans, but these days, we feed a lot.  More and more orphans are showing up at our centers looking for food and love.  I figured we were probably feeding a thousand or so of them, so I asked Jumbo what the number was.

"2700," he said.

That blows my mind.  AIM is not an orphan ministry per se.  We minister to a lot of orphans as we seek to engage in "true religion" around the globe.  But somehow I'd misapprehended reality by 1700 orphans.

Churches in Uganda are not orphan ministries per se, but many of them devote the lion's share of their tithes to the work of caring for orphans.  And I suppose a lot of us might say that "I'm not an orphan ministry person." But the problem with that is that God has got lots of orphans and he's an orphan ministry God.

More of us need to make room in our churches for an orphan-loving God.  He wants to make room in our hearts for his orphans.  As long as our hearts are filled with our own stuff, it can't accommodate God's orphans and other objects of his affection.  He must perform heart surgery to expand our hearts' capacity to love.

Several years ago, he confronted me with the proposition that his orphans were going to start taking over my life.  He informed me that he wanted them on my porch and in my kitchen.  He made room in my heart for them. I like the privacy of my front porch and I know that Karen likes children out of the way when she cooks.

But God was more interested in his orphans than our comfort.

What is taking up room in your heart that God may want to clear out of the way? My counsel is to go ahead and give it to him now.