CHAPTER 11

Last One, Best One

Jesus often uses our blind spots to reveal Himself to us.

I regularly visit Northern Iraq to check on one of the schools where our

organization, Love Does, helps young children find safety and a loving
environment in a war zone. If you keep up with the news, you know the
Middle East is a really rough place with lots of turmoil. Northern Iraq is
no different, and we do all we can to help these kids get a different vision
for the future of their lives. A couple of terrific organizations and a few
families decided to move there and be with these kids and the people in
the communities where they serve. I love seeing the kids thrive when just
weeks or months earlier they didn’t know where they’d get their next
meal or where they’d sleep that night.
With our friends, we run schools for hundreds of kids displaced by the
civil wars. We have a hospital, a school with hundreds of Yazidi and
refugee kids, and homes we’ve built for refugees from Syria. We’ve met
with Peshmerga fighters on the front lines as they battled ISIS soldiers
we could see from behind sandbags a short distance away. The name
Peshmerga means “the people who confront death.” It’s an apt
description of these brave men.
We’ve given these brave Peshmerga fighters medals to let them know
how proud we are of them. One time while at the front lines, one of the
generals invited us to come into his tent where they had laid out a battle
plan for retaking Mosul, a city of two million people. I couldn’t wait to
see the detailed maps and plans and satellite images I imagined were
inside. Surprisingly, there were none of those. Instead, there was an eight-