Happy 10th birthday, Love Without Reason

i want to give you a quick look back and share a look ahead to the next 10 years!

Looking Back

The vision of LWR is to Love, Transform, and Reintegrate the vulnerable and the victims of human trafficking. During our early years, we realized that children with untreated cleft lip/palate were at risk for being sold into human trafficking networks such as child labor, child beggary, sex trade, and organ harvesting.

To attain our mission of providing cost-free, high quality craniofacial surgeries to children and adults in developing countries, we began work in South India. Our team traveled into the rural areas of India to find the “hidden” children born with clefts, and offer them surgeries. The super-specialty hospitals such as People Tree Hospital, HCG Group of Hospitals, Rainbow Hospital, Aster CMI partnered with us to impact these young lives. Our success in India enabled us to broaden our horizons into Zimbabwe, Africa. In June 2017, LWR completed 58 surgeries in six days, changing the faces of 58 individuals!!

With Project Butterfly, LWR pursues the victims of human trafficking in Mumbai. The red-light district in the suburbs of Mumbai has more than a thousand sex slaves. The Love Without Reason Center is a place of refuge for these women and their children. Over the past two years, the center has helped scores of women learn new skills and helped liberate some women. The work continues in dangerous environments filled with oppression and darkness. However, the message of Love Without Reason will be shared to these women, who once believed there was no hope for them.

Looking Ahead

As we look to the next ten years, the doors to India and the nations within Africa are opening for LWR.  We are called to:

• Penetrate the darkest interiors of Africa and India with hope, health, awareness and education
• Reach vulnerable children born with facial birth defects, and provide life-altering surgery
• Break the shackles of slavery and trafficking
• Plan out international disaster relief response

Friends, as 2017 comes to an end, we want to offer you the opportunity to invest into good ground. We encourage you to sow into this work that sets captives free, liberates the oppressed, and shares good news with the poor!! Thank you for believing in this vision!

Now, as far as gifts for Love Without Reason, how about rebranding and a stunning website. Check out Love Without Reason’s new website at www.lovewithoutreason.org and let us know what you think. 

Our thanks to myheartcreative, led by the amazing team of Vinod and Amy Samuel and Kelcy Thompson for their creativity, hard work and patience (with the Mathews family). There is no better way to inaugurate the 10th anniversary year!  We are so thankful for this team and their dedication to serve. For more information on their work, please visit www.myheartcreative.com. And tell them that Love Without Reason sent you! Feel free to comment with your prayers and wishes for LWR! 

Kenya on our heart

Santhosh and I were blessed to attend this year’s Global Missions Health Conference in Kentucky. While there we connected with other organizations, relief agencies, ministries working to expand the Kingdom by their service. We met people from Kenya and listened to their stories. We have always been told that the northern region of Kenya has little to no health care services at all. We could not imagine what was happening to the children born there with craniofacial differences. What has become of their lives?

One young woman, Michelle, from Hope Matters International shared her story. As a nurse practitioner, when she first arrived in Kenya, she was placed in the labor and delivery room to assist the physicians and midwives. Because of the lack of resources and finances, the clinics were ill-equipped to deal at full force with a new life entering the world. For those newborns who were not breathing on their own, and who remained blue due to lack of oxygen, Michelle was instructed to turn from the baby and focus her strength on saving the mother. The baby would not survive, and there was no incubator or respirator to help in any case.

Our hearts were broken to hear this. I remember immediately after Philip’s delivery, he was suctioned and his breathing reflex kicked in. If a baby like him was born in Kenya, he would drown in his own secretions.

Friends, we cannot pretend ignorance on the need any longer. How many children like Philip are being born every year in Kenya, and never open their eyes to the light? Per the Healthy Newborn Network, 39% of Kenyan newborns die of congenital abnormalities and pre term complications.

Santhosh was able to visit Nairobi, Kenya in November to meet leaders and see the hospitals. God willing in 2018, LWR will return and join the efforts to bring the newborn mortality rate down in Kenya. You may not be able to come to Kenya yourself, but you can send LWR. Partner with us!

We must continue the work, Until The World Is Cleft-Free!