Anthony Wanjiru walked into his mother’s house in the Kawangware slums of Nairobi, Kenya, on Christmas morning, eyeing an empty table with indignation and feeling a painfully empty stomach, unaware that he was about to meet God for the first time.
It was Christmas time, Wanjiru remembers, and the sight was a familiar one. Day after day, year after year, Wanjiru’s family lived in utter poverty and near-constant hunger.
He was around 12 years old at the time, wondering why God was punishing his family.
“I think food became a way in which I felt poor. I felt hopeless,” Wanjiru recalled. “I think at the core of it, food makes you human, gives you a sense of, ‘I’m a human being.’ So, when that is taken away, you feel less of a human being. You don’t feel you have dignity as a human.”
Life in Kawangware was marked by crime, prostitution, and abject poverty. Many children had no choice but to forego school to scrounge dump sites for trash to sell, gathering what little money they could to help their families afford to eat.
Wanjiru’s family was no different. They attended church, but were taught a prosperity gospel that led them to believe that their suffering was due to a lack of faith.
As a young boy, Wanjiru scrubbed the church pews until his knuckles bled, hoping the pain would earn favor from a withholding god.
“[I thought it was] because of the sin in my life, and that’s why I’m being punished,” Wanjiru said. “If you pray long enough, if you pray hard enough, then God will forgive you, and he’ll give you all these things. [Cleaning the church pews] was me showing God, ‘Please, if you would forgive me and love me, you give us food.’”
It was this understanding that stirred anger in the young Wanjiru when he saw that there was, once again, no food to eat on Christmas morning. As he questioned God, he questioned his mother’s own effort in providing for them.
His wearied mother prompted the family to pray and thank God for the meal they were about to eat. The plates remained empty after the prayer as Wanjiru contemplated whether his mother had finally lost her mind.
Just minutes later, a neighbor knocked on their door. They worked at a hotel in downtown Nairobi and explained that there was food left over from a Christmas meal for guests, and they felt they should bring some to their friends.
The bag was filled to the brim with sausages, pancakes, and other breakfast delicacies. And Wanjiru became full in a way he never had before.
“That’s the first time in my life I felt God is real. He actually answers prayer. He cares for me that much to send this guy who didn’t even know what was going on to give us food. That shaped my faith completely,” Wanjiru said.
“The faith of my mom ushered me into a place where I was like, ‘God is real. Wow. God is real. He answers.’”
The encounter was a harbinger of kindness to come Wanjiru and his family. Not long after, he was welcomed into the burgeoning child development program of Compassion International in Nairobi.
Since the 1950s, Compassion has partnered with local churches across the globe so that children in impoverished communities are “known, loved, and protected.”
Wanjiru was one of millions of stories transformed by the work. As he tells it now, the program was where his faith deepened, and an understanding of the God of the Bible was fully developed.
For his soul to develop an appetite for the bread of life, his stomach needed to be fed.
“The best gift Compassion gave me was not the beef stew, it was the encounter with Jesus. Through Compassion I really became aware of who Jesus is and what he did on the cross,” Wanjiru said.
“You find Jesus meeting [physical] need first, and then people are able to sit and listen to the Word. It begins with that because it shows that you care for the welfare of this person.”
Wanjiru made his way to the U.S. for school as a young adult, eventually staying to work and teach. But what he learned through his childhood sufferings, and the God he met, is still the foundation for how he lives.
He still advocates for and works with Compassion International, returning home to the same slums he grew up in to serve the community there, but his primary work is carried out daily in his new home. Wanjiru works with Denver Rescue Mission, feeding the hungry and homeless, along with iSSACHAR Center for Urban Leadership in Denver.
It’s the incarnational ministry every Christian is called to, he explained. Physical needs are often the medium by which an opening for Gospel conversation is presented.
Wanjiru serves many who have suffered in the same way he did. In the hungry children, he sees himself. In the wearied mothers scraping together a living, he sees his own mother. In the downtrodden men, he sees his father.
The care he shows them prompts questions of ‘why?’ He is quick and eager to answer: because Jesus loved him.
“I can minister to them in the same way God ministered to me,” Wanjiru said. “As I serve them this bowl of spaghetti, they can see God’s love in my eyes; they can see how generous I am in the portions that I’m giving them as a way of telling them, “No, no, no, no. God cares about you. He thinks about you. He knows who you are. He knows what you’re going through.”
Wanjiru carries with him what his hungry younger self did not know: that he has a seat at the feast table of the king by the king’s own invitation. Not through bloodied knuckles and perfect prayer, but by grace and grace alone.
“God is saying, ‘Give me those two loaves, give me that piece of bread and see what I can do with that,” Wanjiru said. “God is telling us there’s need, and he’s asking us like he asks Isaiah, ‘Whom can I send?’ There are needs everywhere. For us is to say, ‘Here I am, send me.’”