Speaker: Darlene Sala | Series: Encouraging Words

Back in the 1980s, Heather Reynolds, along with her husband, Patrick, founded an outreach that has saved thousands of children among the Zulu people of South Africa. They call it God’s Golden Acre.

Working as artists in an area called Deep Valley, the Reynolds’ lives were forever changed when an orphaned Zulu girl walked on their property looking for work. The girl was about fourteen, pregnant and hungry, with nowhere to go. It was during the days of apartheid, and Heather knew that having a black girl live with them would invoke their neighbors’ anger. But she also knew they could not turn her away.  This was the humble beginning of a loving home for hundreds and hundreds of children with HIV-AIDS and those orphaned by the dread killer.

As Heather began to explore Deep Valley, she found thousands more young children in broken-down huts trying to care for their even younger brothers and sisters—some starving. As a young woman who as a child had cried at the death of even the smallest animal, Heather was touched in ways that required her to take action. What Heather had was heart, drive, and an enormous faith in God.

Over the years that God’s Golden Acre has existed, Heather has experienced times when there was no food for the children, when their broken-down vehicle left them no way to get supplies to the desperate people in the valley. She has shared her bed with urgently ill babies and cried over children as they died in her arms. But she has never given up.

Whenever she feels low, Heather turns to the slogans she’s plastered across her office wall—like the one that says, “Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off the goal.”[1]

Heather demonstrates the words of Jesus, Who said, “I must keep going today and tomorrow and the next day” (Luke 13:33). May God give to us the determination, perseverance, and faith of Heather Reynolds!

 

 

 

 

 

[1] Dale le Vack, God’s Golden Acre (Oxford, UK and Grand Rapids, MI: Monarch Books, 2005), 262.