I posted a couple of times recently about Tahereh Mafi, and I just want to say one more thing about her. When I posted about her, I had no idea that she’d signed a three-book deal for a huge amount of money and that a movie was coming, too. I hadn’t dug around her site. I’d stumbled onto her blog, read a few posts and thought she was a fantastic writer is all. Now I see that others—people with deep pockets—also think she’s pretty great.

I wasn’t posting about her because she’s made money writing and she’s going to be the next big thing. I was posting about her because she’s such a good writer that I believe she’s going to have an impact on children’s publishing, and on many, many children. I wrote about her because I think she will change the world.

Today I want to tell you about another young woman who is a great blogger and who IS ALREADY changing the world. She has a book, Kisses from Katie, coming out this year. She also has a blog, and when I read it, I weep.

Every time.

Katie Davis left family, friends, and a college education behind, went to Uganda, and adopted a bunch of orphans. She has become the mother of fourteen children (I think she’s twenty-three years old!), and Amazima, the ministry she founded, feeds 1600 and sends 400 to school. Her story is thrilling—better than fiction—and what she writes on her blog is powerful stuff.

She has already changed the lives of the children she’s taken in and the children’s she’s fed and schooled.

She is still changing my life and the lives of so many who are gaining an opportunity to serve or be served through Amazima.

She will continue to change the lives of the people she brushes up against each day.

Here is a young woman who is doing what God has called her to do. It’s been hard for her. But it’s also filled her life with joy and excitement.

And what does it take to do what Katie is doing? It takes a willingness to be spent for others. A willingness to lay down your life, to lay down your possessions, to lay down your hopes, and to give yourself up to God’s plans. Or, maybe it takes guts enough to hope for huge things and to hold on to your hopes in the face of opposition and naysayers. Probably it takes both—a willingness to be emptied and then filled again. Emptied of smaller dreams and filled with bigger, better dreams.

I don’t think most of us are called to move to Uganda, but I do think we are called to lay our lives down for others. To serve the oppressed. To feed the hungry. To cloth the naked. We all should be doing these things.

What does this have to do with children’s writing?

Everything.

What we write for children can help them become like Katie or become like Madonna. What we earn as children’s writers can be spent on feeding and educating children or buying clothes and sports cars for ourselves. What we speak about when we visit schools can encourage service or selfishness.

CS Lewis, who wrote wonderful, life-changing children’s books, says:

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ‘ordinary’ people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner—no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment.

–C. S. Lewis, From The Weight of Glory.

This bears repeating: All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations.

These people we rub up against, from the grocery store clerk to the orphan in Africa to the rich and powerful people of the world, are all eternal beings and what we say, what we write, how we live…all of it affects them in some way. We can encourage or discourage, we can build up or tear down, we can rebuke in love or ignore in apathy, we can speak with wisdom or spew out folly.

In the end, we all change the world in some way. For good or ill.

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