Jane Wells

Source: Still A Season For Miracles To Happen

Whether you’re celebrating the miracle of Hanukkah, the miracle of Christmas, both, or neither, it’s good to remember that good things still happen.

New Life Home Trust

Last month, I traveled to Kenya to profile a charity I’ve been a fan of since first visiting it in 2007—New Life Home Trust.

Clive and Mary Beckenham started New Life in 1994, after taking in an abandoned, HIV-positive newborn who was destined to die.

But he didn’t die.

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With care and love, he lived. Seventeen years later, he is a healthy teen who became their adopted son.

The Beckenhams—two British missionaries—wanted to do something after arriving in Kenya to help the estimated two million orphans, many of them born of mothers who had AIDS, often abandoned at birth.

When the first baby not only survived, but thrived, the Beckenhams raised funds and launched what would become a series of homes in Kenya where abandoned newborns could be nursed back to health and then adopted into new families. “We don’t say New Life Home is the end of the journey,” Clive Beckenham says. “It’s just the beginning.”

Over the years, the nonprofit has taken in 1,300 babies. The vast majority have been adopted.

In the video, you will meet one of these new families. Dennis and Allison Omondi learned on November 1, 2010 they could not have children. This Kenyan pastor and his American wife prayed for help.

Months later they heard of a newborn boy discarded in a public toilet in the back of a slum. His name was Benjamin. “Love at first sight,” said Dennis.

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Only later did they learn that Benjamin was born on November 1, the same day they felt despair. “I am not a crying person,” said Omondi, who then referenced his smiling wife. “She was bawling, I’m sitting there thinking wow, God, this is awesome.”

A happy ending to a story that I hope reminds us with all the strife and stress in the world, this is still a season for miracles.

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