A Story of Love

With everything happening in the world, from wars and famine to the everyday rise of depression and loneliness, I know it can feel hard sometimes to see the good. The weight of it all is so heavy. The headlines, the heartbreak, the broken systems, it can dull our vision. And I think it’s become a part of human nature. We are wired to notice the danger, to see what’s going wrong. But sometimes, in that constant scanning for pain, we forget to stop and notice the beauty. The everyday miracles. The quiet acts of love that shift the world in unseen ways.

So I want to share a story with you.

It’s a story of hope and healing, a story that displays the goodness of God and what that looks like when people choose to live like Jesus. It’s a story about a patient of mine from my last field service while I was still working onboard the ship. And it’s a reminder, both to me and, I hope, to you, that there are still good people in this world. People with enormous hearts. People who live with fierce love.

The story begins in a rural village far in the north of Sierra Leone, a place most of the world will never see. A place where life moves slowly, where roads are made of dirt, and where the traditions of ancestors still shape everyday beliefs. It’s where a little boy was born. A boy whose life would unfold in ways unimaginable to most of us.

When he was still very young, his mother died. And with her went the only safety and comfort he had known. The boy was left to be raised by relatives. But life in some rural communities comes with beliefs that we, from outside, can barely comprehend. Ideas about curses and witchcraft still run deep. One day, the boy began to grow a tumour on his face. It started small. But it didn’t stop. It grew larger and larger until it began to change his appearance completely.

If he had been born in Australia, or America, or anywhere with access to quality healthcare, his story would’ve looked so different. His father would have taken him to a hospital. Surgeons would have removed the tumour early, and life would have gone on. But that’s not the reality here.

Because of the tumour, and because of the fear and misunderstanding that surrounded it, the village began to believe he was cursed. They said he was marked by evil. He was shunned. Abandoned. Rejected by his own family. Left to survive on his own, the little boy took to living in the jungle near his village. We have no idea how many years he was alone. He scavenged for food. He drank from rivers. He survived, barely, as the tumour grew so large it became hard for him to eat.

And yet… there was still light in him.

A detail I’ll never forget is hearing about the broken radio he found when he was alone. Despite everything, he would dance in the jungle, all alone, to the static and music that leaked from it. A little boy, rejected by the world, still dancing.

And then, God stepped in. Not through lightning bolts or miracles from the sky, but through a woman. A woman with love in her heart and compassion in her bones.

She was a nurse living in Freetown. Her father lived near the village and had heard whispers of a disfigured boy living in the bush. When she heard the story, she didn’t hesitate. She travelled to the village and searched the jungle until she found him. And when she saw him, she didn’t see a curse. She saw a child. A boy who needed help. A boy who needed love.

She brought him home with her. And she became his mother, not by blood, but by choice. When she heard about the hospital ship coming to Sierra Leone, she knew this was the answer to her prayers. She brought him to us.

And that’s when I met him.

Looking after this boy was one of the greatest honours of my life. Despite everything he had endured, every abandonment, every whispered insult, every night spent alone in the jungle, he was full of joy. He was kind. He was soft-spoken and polite. He had this spark about him, this contagious hope. And his eyes… they held so much depth, so much story. The surgeons removed the tumour and slowly, he began to heal.

But the real healing? That didn’t just come from scalpels or sutures. It came slowly, gently, over time.

It came in the way he started to lift his head a little higher. In the way his shoulders began to relax. In the way his eyes began to meet yours when you spoke to him, no longer darting away in fear or shame. It came in the giggles that began to escape when he played with the nurses on the ward, or when someone turned on music and he couldn’t help but dance. The same quiet boy who once lived in hiding, shamed and isolated, now dancing down the hallway and squealing with laughter at silly jokes.

He started to trust again. To believe that people weren’t just there to look at him, to whisper about him, or to turn away, but to love him. To care for him. To protect him. And that was the miracle that brought tears to all of our eyes, not just that he survived, but that he began to live.

This change, this transformation, was more than medical. It was spiritual. Emotional. It was redemptive. It was the kind of healing only love can bring.

He went from surviving to thriving. From being seen as a curse to being celebrated as a child of God. From hiding in the jungle to standing in a classroom, raising his hand with excitement, wearing his first school uniform with pride.

And that’s what this change means.

It means restoration. It means identity. It means dignity returned. It means he is no longer defined by what happened to him, but by the hope of what lies ahead. It means his story is no longer one of abandonment, but one of love that found him, lifted him, and gave him a future.

Last week a year after his surgery he started school. For the first time in his life, he walked into a classroom with a uniform and a backpack. Just the other day, he said to me, “I want to be a doctor. So I can help people like the doctors on the ship helped me.”

And the woman—the one who searched for him in the jungle, who fed him, clothed him, loved him—she is the reason this story exists at all. She is the turning point. The vessel of grace that walked straight into the heartbreak of someone else’s life and chose to stay.

She could have turned away. Most people would have. She could have said it wasn’t her responsibility, that the problem was too big, too complicated, too far from her world. But instead, she went looking. She followed the whispers of a story, travelled miles to find him, and stepped into the unknown with a heart wide open.

When she saw him—skin and bone, disfigured and discarded—she didn’t flinch. She didn’t see a curse. She saw a child.She wrapped her arms around him and brought him home.And that’s the moment everything changed.She is the example of what it looks like when someone truly chooses to live like Jesus—not just in words or on Sundays, but in the grit of real life. In the mess. In the margins. Her love was fearless. Bold. Sacrificial.

It wasn’t performative or convenient. It cost her something. And she gave it anyway.She fed him when he was hungry. She tended to his wounds. She held him through nightmares. She became his mother not because she had to—but because she chose to.

Her life became an echo of Christ’s love: one that doesn’t ask what’s easy, but what’s needed.And because of her, a child who once danced alone in the jungle now dances in freedom. He knows what love feels like. What safety means. What it is to belong.

Her story reminds me that healing begins with love. That when we love like Jesus—with courage, with compassion, with action—miracles don’t just happen. They multiply.

This is the story of a boy who once had no name, no hope, no future, and the woman who gave him all three.

Their story will stay with me for the rest of my life. Because in a world that so often feels broken beyond repair, they are proof that goodness still exists. That love still wins. That miracles still happen.

You just have to look for them.