The courtroom grew still. Pastor Rachid Seighir straightened, awaiting the verdict on his latest appeal. 

His bookshop in Oran City, Algeria, had been closed since 2017, when police confiscated his printing equipment. At the time, he’d been accused of printing and distributing Christian literature. Though the judge had ruled in his favor then and his equipment had been returned, the shop had never reopened. In 2021, the accusation reemerged. Someone had slipped the charge under the door of the church Rachid pastored. He had been fined and sentenced to two years in jail. The church, too, had been closed by the Algerian government.

Now, Rachid’s world hung in the balance. With a short flourish, the judge pronounced the verdict of a one-year suspended sentence and a fine. Rachid released a long, relieved sigh and left the courthouse, deeply thankful to be heading home to his wife and two teenage children rather than to prison. 

With brothers and sisters around the world lifting him up in prayer, Rachid would continue to appeal the accusation, but it wasn’t the first time he’d been in court. In the face of losing his freedom, Rachid understood the cost of actively sharing God’s love in his country.

In October 2017, a few years before Rachid’s appeals hearing and before the government mandated harsh restrictions on church gatherings, Algerian Jesus followers outside the coastal city of Oran confronted a red wax seal covering the lock and dripping down the door handle at the House of Hope, a prominent Protestant church and ministry center. According to an order from the governor of Oran, all activities and meetings were to stop immediately at the House of Hope and several other churches scattered across the country.

In September 2018, believers in Algeria, united under the Algerian Protestant Church (EPA), commenced a year of 24/7 prayer and fasting. The following two years brought more troubles: more church closures, more pressure on landowners renting space to Christians, more persecution for individual believers, including prison sentences for those accused of proselytizing. Then the pandemic struck and gave the Algerian government another reason to suppress the gathering of Protestant believers.

Pastor Youssef Ourahmane, vice president of the EPA, and his wife, Hie Tee, are pioneers in the missions training and discipleship movement in Algeria, as well as founders of the House of Hope. They consider the latest forms of persecution “sort of normal,” they say. “We all carry on because we have to continue to stand firm and let the Lord fight for us.”

The Ourahmanes spoke to me on the phone from their home in southern Spain, where they were waiting out travel restrictions. They maintain an apartment in Algeria, which, along with the House of Hope, was sealed in the early days of the church closures. “We made the window into a door,” says Hie Tee. “The Lord gives us the courage and the peace to do what we need to do.”

Persecution, of course, is nothing new for Christendom. Jesus himself was cursed, criticized, condemned, and ultimately crucified—before rising from the dead and ushering in the hope, peace, and assurance of God’s love that believers claim today. Despite facing threats and physical assault, Hie Tee says, “the disciples also went on to share the gospel, and so it has not stopped since then. In the same way, we just carry on—under his protection and his enabling grace and strength and his Holy Spirit. So to him be the glory.”

Youssef agrees. “The biggest mistake the church can make is to give in to fear”—particularly across the Middle East and North Africa, where Jesus followers often face strong societal backlash and persecution for their faith. “So many churches have given in to fear,” he says, “and they have failed to do what God has asked them to do.” 

More than two years since producer Mike Cosper began recording interviews for the show, The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill returns with its most poignant episode yet—a road trip to Seattle to stand in the spaces where Mars Hill Church began.



This epilogue of the critically acclaimed podcast sends Cosper and executive producer Erik Petrik on a trip down memory lane, visiting the buildings and church members who formed the vibrant community that would one day fall apart.



From Seattle living rooms crammed with chairs to an empty sanctuary slated for demolition, discover afresh the mystery of God working in broken places. And, as you see how “time humbles and reveals all,” let the story of Mars Hill compel you toward truth not trends, grace not grandeur. Come, meet the people and places that have remained, marked indelibly with love for the gospel and for Seattle. Meet those who never left.



As this series concludes, a special thanks to: Joy Beth Smith, Andrea Palpant Dilley, Morgan Lee, Russell Moore, Ted Olsen, Daniel Silliman, and Kate Shellnutt. Thank you, especially to Tim Dalrymple and Erik Petrik, Kate Siefker, and to Sarah and the Cosper girls. Thank you to the members of Mars Hill Church, especially, Wendy Alsup, Jesse Bryan, Sutton Turner, Tim Smith, Aaron Gray, Jen Smidt, and Ben Vandermeer.

Khaled Hamoud

Before the government’s crackdown on Christian gatherings, worshipers at one of the larger churches situated among the snowcapped mountains of Kabylia—the birthplace of the Algerian revival—used to arrive an hour early to secure seats. Believers gathered quietly and prepared themselves to worship God and welcome the presence of the Holy Spirit. From there, services regularly stretched over three hours. Afterward, people still didn’t want to leave, so they remained and socialized together.

From the first outreach into the region in 1981, when about 30 young men decided to follow Jesus during a football tournament, the light of Christ has sparked life into hundreds of thousands of Algerians, igniting countless house groups and churches. The fledgling church, though acknowledged by the government, has attracted persecution from its inception. Like Rachid, early Algerian believers memorized verses about overcoming fear, understanding they could lose their livelihoods or even their lives for deciding to follow Jesus.

Restrictions to accessing church buildings and places like the Emmanuel Center, a large missions training hub in Kabylia, have impacted evangelistic training as well. Youssef and Hie Tee had dreamed of sending 1,000 Algerian believers to share God’s love in other countries by 2025. “Because of the closure of the church, we have been humbled in many ways,” Hie Tee says. Discipleship and training have endured, albeit on a smaller scale. “The big change that we’re going to pray for is that through this, within the church of Christ in Algeria, there will be people who wake up to mission,” she said. “God is in control, and God is purifying the church and making people seek him.” 

In standing firm, the Algerian church has become an example for other Christians in the region, especially those from Muslim backgrounds. Algerian believers are “all Muslim converts, but they’re not afraid; they’re resisting,” Youssef says. “They’re not only willing to believe, but they’re also willing to suffer.”

That suffering has also garnered international support. Leaders from the United States, France, and Switzerland have intervened on behalf of Algerian believers. Because of persecution, the world has learned more about the circumstances and the bravery of the Algerian church. 

And while Christians in Algeria remain prohibited from meeting together in large groups in church buildings, they still spread the gospel online through expansive social media ministries and internet TV programs airing in Arabic, Kabyle, and French. 

Gathering is a gift, but even when it’s prohibited, God is still working. “Even in the midst of all of this,” says Youssef, “people are still coming to faith.”

I did not plan to go to prison today. Yet I watch the red dirt as I walk—how it puffs and gathers on my shoes, seeping inside to turn my toes a brickish hue. I am not looking at the men urinating in the gutters to my left. I am not looking at the rows of eyes watching me from my right. I am not looking up at the guards in the towers with guns turned inward and downward upon the courtyard. I am thinking only about reaching the sanctum of the prison chapel.

At the small shed’s doorframe, I take off my shoes with a slight sense of ceremony and glance at my red-rimmed feet. I am aware that the aged mat I’m stepping onto is the ground of miracles. When my eyes adjust to the dimness—the sun filtering through the fabric walls—I see a teenager with a generous and nervous smile. He’s wearing a simple gray t-shirt and a wooden cross necklace that I’ll later learn he carved for himself. His name is Nesanet. He is about to show me the kingdom of heaven. 

The city of Hawassa gathers around the banks of Lake Awassa in Ethiopia’s Great Rift Valley. Tourists come to see hippos and crocodiles bobbing in the lake, sip coal-boiled coffee, or connect with their Rastafarian roots in nearby Sheshamene. I was there with a video team from the American Bible Society to discover how audio Bibles in Amharic were transforming lives in the region. When we arrived, our local team members told us, “You have to go to the prison. You have to hear what God is doing there.”

I didn’t expect to come face to face with heaven in a maximum-security prison. I knew I might experience a glimpse of it in between the pews of Ethiopia’s sanctuaries, or even in the backseats of the many icon-filled taxis churning around the streets of the city. Prison, however, is where I met Nesanet.

Nesanet was a young man with limited economic opportunities who had resorted to a life of thieving to survive. When things went sideways during a botched job, Nesanet ended up stabbing someone, and this landed him in prison in Awassa—something he told me he thanked God for every day. He felt like God had plucked him off the streets and dropped him into an in-between space where he was confronted with the faith that had long been at the periphery of his existence but never quite real. 

He met his Savior when he heard the Word read aloud from a device called a “Proclaimer,” which is a solar or crank-powered audio Bible reader that looks like a small radio. That day, lying on a mat in the room he shared with ten other men, words straight from God flowed into and through him in a way he’d never known was possible. From that moment on, Nesanet spent hours every day immersing himself in the Bible; as I spoke with him, I saw evidence of his saturation in Scripture. He shared how God was his companion when he was lonely during visitation hours, how God redeemed the monotony of the days with opportunities for worship, and how God compelled him to live differently by doing things like sharing the gifts of soaps and candies he received instead of using them as tools for bartering.

To me, Nesanet seems like he could be a character straight out of the Bible. It’s tempting for those living 2,000 years after Jesus to think of biblical characters as just that, literary abstractions intended to tell a story and teach a lesson. However, in the same way we live out our days in the mundane and glorious alike, these characters were real, corporeal people who lived in the muck of their reality, capturing fleeting glimpses of some redemption beyond themselves. Like Nesanet, like me, like you, they had an idea of what God’s kingdom should be, and they attempted, through their own broken understanding and efforts, to bring heaven to earth. 

This tension, I think, is essential to living our faith. We are souls enlightened with a higher purpose, yet we are also bodies operating in the dirt of a not-yet-new earth. We pray the prayer Jesus taught us—“Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”—but do we consider what this vision of a God-transformed earth requires of us now? The full gospel calls us to transcendent holiness without ridding us of our responsibility to the mess of humanity. Jesus—fully God, fully man—lived this shared priority by example. He prayed to the Father; he washed his friends’ feet. As he grew in his understanding and relationship to Christ, Nesanet cultivated a kingdom mindset that allowed him to live in humility and service—even inside the walls of a prison.

When I first met him, Nesanet was training for the priesthood while serving his sentence. “We look up to Nesanet, you know,” a younger teenager in the prison told me. “He’s a real role model for us.” No one expects someone carrying the label “criminal” to be a model of redemption, but God often contradicts our logic. When God made Nesanet new, Nesanet trusted the implicit truth of that redemption. He released the memories of what he had done and clung to the promise of who God was re-making him to be. Nesanet’s journey reveals the beautiful challenge of grasping onto the kingdom of God every day and gripping its transformation tightly. 

As our videographers finished their film work for American Bible Society by shooting b-roll footage, we asked Nesanet if he would lead other chapel visitors in a song of praise. He’d been demure all day, but as he began to sing, he exuded a celebratory, almost boisterous spirit of freedom and joy. He stood in a white robe and thumped a drum as the group joined together in worship of their redeemer. As we stopped filming, to our surprise, they didn’t stop singing. We witnessed heaven manifest upon the wooden benches, splash out from the open doorframe, and shimmer across the hot dirt. I like to think the curious men watching from outside could see it. I like to think we saw a little piece of earth remade in heaven’s image that day.

Back in our hotel in Addis Ababa, I rinse my feet in the shower and watched as little red trails slither from my toes down the drain. “You are dirt, and you will return to dirt,” I whisper to no one. Then I hear a low voice that makes me push open the window to listen. A voice reverberates off the half-finished buildings around us, a priest chanting over a loudspeaker in Ge’ez, one of the oldest languages known to Christianity. Some trace the roots of Christianity here all the way back to the Ethiopian eunuch referenced in Acts 8. Perhaps the first Ethiopian Christian is still declaring his baptism into the faith all these centuries later.

At the sound of that ancient hope, I am transported to the day when Nesanet too will speak redemption over the land. In the same way that he heard the Word and it changed everything, he will declare that same truth over and over. He will remind us that this is the kingdom of heaven come home. Even if our earthly eyes can’t quite see it yet.

Kibet proudly stood at the gate of Kimbilio Hospice. The sash draped across his chest read “Here to serve.” The message was as out of place on his security guard uniform as the work Kibet and his colleagues do every day in our village.

Kibet knew well that by the time a patient arrived at the gate, they had walked a long and arduous road. Each guest came with a failing body and a unique story, with the pain and suffering and hopes and fears that go along with advanced disease. 

A survivor himself, Kibet understood it was his job—his ministry—to warmly welcome and direct each family bringing their loved one into our care on the shore of the Kipkaren River in Western Kenya.

Combined with abject poverty, the vulnerability of being incurably sick causes people to be overlooked and undervalued. It was for such people that the hospice (kimbilio means “a place to run to” in Swahili) was created. Our desire from the start has been that we might be a community of compassion that reminds people of their worth.  

It was a warm afternoon in December 2004 when I first met Kibet. He was asleep under the shade of a banana tree, covered by a heavy woolen blanket. His feet extended well beyond the length of the foam mattress on which he lay. His body had been ravaged by untreated disease, and little more than a skeletal frame remained.

A neighbor had asked me to check on the man with ugonjwa—“the sickness.” There was much stigma and fear attached to AIDS, and while everyone assumed that was the cause of Kibet’s condition, no one would say the word.

I was a 25-year-old nurse practitioner who had left my job at an HIV unit in Los Angeles four months earlier in order to work in Kenya. By that time in the United States, HIV was mostly treated as a chronic disease. In Kenya, we couldn’t even say the word out loud, let alone access testing or treatment.

It was the conviction that no one should die alone that led me to leave my home and family to move to Kenya. And yet, even when I was able to stay by the side of those who were terminally ill, I had to wrestle with a new conviction that began to emerge in me: no one should die of a preventable and treatable disease because of poverty, geography, or any other reason.

Surprised by my company, Kibet asked for a drink of water. I raised a metal cup to his lips as he gently sipped. In that moment, I predicted his story: I would make routine home visits to care for Kibet and his wife, Karemi. Within weeks, he would die—without a proper diagnosis and without the option of treatment. The community would gather for his burial, and the problem of AIDS would continue its destructive and unchallenged pattern.

I couldn’t see much further than the suffering and pain as I knelt in the red dirt beside Kibet’s dying body. Still, I trusted that God was there, loving both of us. 

A few days later, we discovered an HIV testing and treatment center in a town only 10 miles away. It had recently opened, and when I took Kibet there, I simply thought it was a normal clinic.

As we stepped into a room filled with HIV test kits, nutritional support, and antiretroviral drugs, all I saw was hope. Tears filled my eyes as I realized the dreams I had been dreaming were smaller than God’s plans for Kibet, for Karemi, and for thousands of others in our community. 

After a few months of taking his daily cocktail of dawa—his anti-HIV medications—Kibet, along with many others from our community, experienced what AIDS workers call the Lazarus Effect. People who had appeared to be dead were coming back to life. 

It was not the medicine alone that changed lives. Working alongside a small but committed team of Kenyans who were passionate about the holistic care we provided to patients and their families, our community-based group program witnessed the power of love tearing down walls of fear and shame.

There was Betty, a single mom of two boys, who had grown terribly sick. In many ways, she had given up hope. She would tell the story of a night when she was lying alone in a little mud hut, weak and tired of the constant sickness afflicting her. The grass on the thatched roof was so sparse that she could see the stars. 

That night, Betty cried out to a God she did not know, asking him either to take her life so she could rest or to restore her life, in which case she would live for him. Shortly after, a friend advised her to go for HIV testing, and she learned she was positive. 

Upon meeting Betty, our team listened to her story and embraced her. Simple acts of love and acceptance introduced her to Jesus and, in dramatic ways, transformed her life. Although her physical suffering continued and her prayers for daily bread were literal, Betty’s faith and courage were multiplying.

Months later as we sat in her home, Betty and I talked about life and God. In a way I will never forget, Betty looked me in the eyes and leaned forward, as if to tell me a secret. “I think I am God’s favorite,” she said. 

“Yes Betty, you most definitely are.”

Within five years of getting to know Kibet and Betty, a dream welled up within me to build a hospice where my team and I could serve patients from around Western Kenya who had advanced cancer or HIV/AIDS. In 2009, we founded Living Room International. Soon after, we built Kimbilio Hospice, a 24-bed inpatient facility where we would serve adults as well as children.

Unintentionally yet remarkably, it was located directly across the path from Kibet’s home. He now mans the hospice gate, living proof of the possibility of life on the other side.

Karemi would tell you she believes the vision of Living Room began when we met her husband under the shade of their tree. It all started with simple acts of mercy—one life at a time. 

Richard Foster writes: “Our God is not made of stone. His heart is the most sensitive and tender of all. No act goes unnoticed, no matter how insignificant or small. A cup of cold water is enough to put tears in the eyes of God.” 

What started with Kibet has grown into a life-giving and transformative refuge for thousands throughout Kenya. Each day, our team asks the guiding question: What does it look like to love in this situation? 

We believe that anything done with love is holy to God. And then, imperfectly but wholeheartedly, in Jesus’ name, we love and serve—over and over again. 

This story contains content that some may find disturbing

The boys were quick, but the witch doctor was quicker.

Moses and Kato lived in Uganda’s Buikwe district, east of the capital city of Kampala. Kato was the younger of the two, a mere ten years old when he disappeared. He loved singing and racing along the dirt roads pushing an old tire with a stick. 

One afternoon he went with his cousin to buy soap from the trading center. It was New Year’s Eve of 2013. The last time anyone saw him, he was with his uncle. 

Children found his body the next day, five minutes from his home. The area smelled of death. A dog carcass rotted nearby among the bushes. The ground was covered with scrubby grass, putrid yellow fruit, and dried blood. “They chopped him here,” says his grandfather, Farouk. “They put down a log and used a panga (a machete) to chop off his head.” 

Kato’s heart and two fingers were taken. Suspicion fell on the uncle Amim Panda, who was burned to death by an angry mob. 

The world, says Farouk, lost a great light. “I knew his talents,” he says. 

It was around the same time that Moses lost his life. Fifteen years old, he was a school prefect who loved soccer. His 30-year-old mother, Rehema, exhausted from having another baby, sent Moses to buy potatoes. It was the last time she would see him alive. When the boy did not return, his father went to look for him. The family searched throughout the weekend. 

“On Monday, he was nowhere to be seen,” says Rehema. On Tuesday, someone located his shoes. Then Rehema overheard a terrible conversation about a child being found. “I started shaking,” she says. “I was bedridden. I was shivering. I didn’t believe it was true.”

When Moses’ body was found in a sugarcane field, it had been horribly mutilated. The family buried what was left of the body in the family plot.

“After the burial, people said my husband killed Moses,” says Rehema. “They arrested him.” They also arrested another relative staying in the home with the family. With no evidence against them, the two were released.

Jon Warren | World Vision

The Buikwe district is the heart of witchcraft in Uganda. All along its dirt roads, the practice is in plain sight. Inside the doorways of thatched-roofed shrines hang the tools of the trade: animal carcasses, shells from nearby Lake Victoria, and doves cooing softly in their cages. 

Obed Byamugisha works in child protection with World Vision. The witchcraft is not new, he says, but something has changed. “Witchcraft has been there, but child sacrifice is new.” Obed has made it his mission to prevent this evil as often as he can. 

Child sacrifice begins with the mutilation of the individual—intending to use their blood or body parts for ritual purposes. Though the horrendous acts are carried out while the child is still alive, very few survive the mutilation. Recent studies come to the same conclusion that child sacrifice, while present in local mythologies, was not a common occurrence until recently. It’s been reported also in Tanzania, Nigeria, Eswatini, Liberia, Botswana, South Africa, Namibia, Kenya, and Zimbabwe. But in Uganda, the problem is particularly severe. Statistics are hard to find, but research conducted in 25 Ugandan communities by Humane Africa in 2013 suggested that one child is sacrificed each week in those communities alone. A 2014 KidsRights study report suggests that, given poor record keeping, these figures may be just the tip of the iceberg, and “the real scope of the spread of child sacrifice is not yet visible.” 

The question is why.

Heather Houseal is a Florida attorney who has worked alongside Kyampisi Childcare Ministries, a Christian community development organization in Kampala, to track down cases that were dismissed or thrown out.

“Uganda is a wonderful place, filled with beautiful and kind people,” Heather says. “But like any other place in the world, Satan uses evil to influence people and circumstances.”

She says poverty precipitates child sacrifice, turning children into a commodity. “Witch doctors charge hundreds of dollars for a child sacrifice. They convince uneducated, poor people that the only way to ensure they get the results they’re looking for is to sacrifice the most pure and potent subject, a child.”

Heather investigated reports of men who kidnapped children to sell to witch doctors. The kidnappers found the gruesome act addictive. “They felt like evil had overtaken them and they wished they could get out, but they just could not stop.”

Law enforcement often fails to stop child sacrifice, and police say they don’t have enough fuel to reach the locations where child sacrifice has been reported.

 “Reporting mechanisms and record keeping are not superb,” says Heather. “Everything is done on paper. Cases get lost. Families give up on a system that is failing them. Or they become too frightened to testify in the face of such evil.”

Among the people of Uganda, the terms “witch doctor” and “traditional healer” are often used interchangeably. But there is a difference: some witch doctors kill children.

Mukasa David Sayansi and Edwin Kibogo identify themselves as traditional healers, explaining that sacrificing birds, goats, and sheep is normal in the Buikwe district. In the middle of their shrine is a tall wooden pole wrapped in goatskins and bark cloth. Bird nests and a dried pangolin hang from the pole. The interior smells of tobacco and cowhide. Outside the hut are cages filled with doves. Mukasa explains, “We suck the blood out of the doves and sprinkle it over the sick.”

Mukasa and Edwin say witch doctors who kill give all traditional healers a bad name.

“The bad ones,” Mukasa says, “sacrifice children, rape women, and tell lies.” There is a belief in Uganda and the surrounding countries that child sacrifice makes traditional medicine stronger. He says there are two kinds of child sacrifice. The first is for money. 

“The witch doctors who put children under buildings get paid a lot—$25,000,” says Mukasa. Those witch doctors take the heads, hearts, and extremities of children and encase them in the foundations of new businesses to ensure they are successful. They sprinkle the blood of children into fishing boats along the shores of Lake Victoria to guarantee larger catches. The Minister of State for Planning in Uganda, Hon. David Bahati, says that it is disheartening to note that human traffickers in Uganda earn over $30 billion USD per year in trading children and their body parts. “It is abhorrent to hear that someone will make the sacrifice of a child’s life to construct a building so that it can generate a lot of wealth for them,” Bahati says. 

The second kind of child sacrifice is used to break a relationship when the witch doctor has exhausted every other way of trying to heal an illness. Instead of admitting failure, witch doctors ask for something they hope will be impossible: the sacrifice of a child. “After eating a patient’s money,” says Mukasa, “they give excuses.”

Edwin says they ask the sick person to do something unthinkable, such as to bring them the head of a child. “They use it to cut the relationship.”

To stop the carnage in the Buikwe district, Obed and his team devised a sort of “Amber Alert” system adapted to its context. “We use drums when a child is stolen,” he says. Motorbike drivers quickly block the main roads as the drumbeats are amplified by loudspeakers. “It causes a chain reaction in the community. When you hear the drum, you know there’s danger and you immediately rise to search for the child.” 

The system links up faith leaders, the media, response agencies, and the justice system to battle child sacrifice together. It also involves the traditional healers who abhor the practice. In 2012, the districts began to register traditional healers as part of an association to weed out the bad ones. So far 547 have been registered. Otherwise, says Mukasa, “we all carry the same blame.” 

Obed’s Amber Alert system has been a success in the district. To date, he says, it has saved 37 children—and even more where it has been implemented in other communities. 

One of those children is Sharon. It was her brother who saved her. At the time, Sharon was three and David was seven. Their father was a fisherman, and their mother often left the children alone while she worked in other people’s gardens. 

David and Sharon were brushing their teeth under a coffee plant in the front yard when strangers approached. “Two men came here and started calling us,” says David. “I told Sharon to run. I ran.” 

But Sharon could not escape. The men captured her and pressed chloroform to her face to silence her cries. 

David ran until he found a neighbor with a cell phone, who called others, and soon the alarm rang out over the area. Motorcycles blocked the highways. The abductors heard the alert and let Sharon go. Her life had been spared because of the work of Obed. 

As Obed worked tirelessly in Buikwe, World Vision and other nongovernmental organizations pressured lawmakers to enact legislation to protect children.

Finally, in May 2021, the Ugandan parliament passed a law criminalizing child sacrifice. The penalty: life in prison. Watching the proceedings unfold live on TV, Obed screamed with joy. 

A few minutes later, he says, “tears started rolling because I immediately remembered all the men and women I promised that this law would be enacted.” Men like Kato’s grandfather, permanently hunched with grief. Women like Moses’ mother, her brown eyes forever flooded in pain. “These men and women lost their children to child sacrifice,” he says, “and most of them died waiting for the law to be enacted.”

For Obed, this victory is bittersweet. He hopes the new law will save many lives, but the cost has been great. “I carry with me painful scars for the lives of children lost,” he says. “I have their photos. I see them daily. But our goal is what makes us do the work.” 

The goal of delivering children from evil. For the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.