I was at the RTC booth when a woman walked up and said, “I’m looking for Andy Baker.” I looked at her for a moment then told her that I’m Andy. I didn’t recognize her either until she gasped and said, “I’m Janet Eldridge from New Albany, Northside Church!” That’s when it hit me. Janet and her husband Stuart were part of a church I pastored decades ago right at the beginning of Remember the Children, and I hadn’t seen them since.
Stuart went on a trip with me when we first started in the late 90s. Mircea had called me about an orphanage in the mountains with 35 kids who were all starving to death. Everybody had abandoned them except two workers. They were trying to keep them alive but just didn’t have a way of doing it.
When I went up with Mircea, it was the beginning of fall and they had no heating, running water, or working bathrooms. It was disgusting and deplorable. The kids were starving and also all handicapped either mentally or physically. Something needed to happen, so I took Stuart back with me a couple months later to deliver medical treatment. Not long after we arrived, I have a clear memory of a moment when Stuart turned from the kids to look at me and said, “Do you know as a physician I can diagnose what is going on here and what is happening, but I can’t fix it? You can’t bring doctors on trips and not have them do something that fixes the problem.”
Last night at ICOM we got to catch up and also relive that moment now almost 25 years later. We both still felt the sadness, but I reminded Stuart that, in that desperate moment, he helped us give them life again. I asked if he remembered what we did next and he said he did. We went and got them a truckload of potatoes because the potato has every vitamin in it you need. We filled the basement with potatoes and helped them make potato soup, mashed potatoes, and baked potatoes. It's all we could get cheap enough for them to stay out of the reach of starvation.
After that, I contacted families in Indianapolis. One family volunteered to put in a heating system, another family invested in redoing the plumbing so the toilets flushed and the showers worked again. Then we bought all new mattresses, pillows, blankets and more.
Coming out of that experience, I remembered Stuart's words, because I was just grieved. I was a pastor trying to make a difference doing missions work. Stuart’s look and words made me deeply ask if we were actually helping. Not too long after, the book When Helping Hurts by Steve Corbett came out, and we began relooking at how we should do missions. I changed along with our approach to missions as a result of that book and many resulting conversations. I’m thankful for the changes we’ve made, but I still have wondered about the impact of those early years.
The cool part is that the situation haunted Stuart as well to the point that, when he was forced to take early retirement as a pediatrician, he decided to do missions work. It’s been such an encouragement to see God take that shared hurt and to really transform their lives to where now he and his wife are ready to go to Tanzania with Remember the Children as part of their work with Teach to Transform. This time they are going to teach the people in Tanzania how to do medical care and leave them with skills instead of just trying to put a bandaid on the problem.
The time I’ve had with the Eldridges this weekend has shown me how God has taken people forward through the experiences with our organization and around our organization now more than 25 years down the road. There are people out there doing things today that I don’t really know about. That motivates me, because you don’t know whose lives you’re touching and how God’s going to use them to do things just through the encounters you’ve had.
What I’m taking away from this is that sometimes when you need a little shot in the arm, God puts people in front of you and says remember me, and it’s just fun. I see it as a redemption, knowing we were trying to do good all those years ago but now actually seeing we are accomplishing good.