Hank Smith:                      00:03                   Welcome to followHIM Favorites. John and I are sharing a single story to go with each week’s Come, Follow Me lesson. John, we’re in 1 Samuel 16:7. Do you remember this story?

John Bytheway:               00:12                   Oh yeah. It’s a great one.

Hank Smith:                      00:14                   This is where Samuel, the prophet, is looking for the new king. He’s looking at all these boys who look like kings, but none of them are the ones the Lord wants. Then they find this young, isn’t he a shepherd, John?

John Bytheway:               00:29                   Yeah, he’s out with the sheep. Well, we got one more over there.

Hank Smith:                      00:32                   Yeah, we didn’t bring him up. He doesn’t look the part. And the prophet Samuel basically learns the lesson from the Lord, I look on the heart. Man looks on the outward appearance. I look on the heart. Okay. I want to tell you about a little six-year-old boy that you would look at maybe a six-year-old boy, John, and think that’s not a person who’s gonna change lives, but he does. January 1998, six-year-old boy, Ryan Hreljac, was sitting in his first grade classroom in Ontario. His teacher said something pretty simple. She said, you know, there’s people in Africa who are sick and dying because they don’t have clean water. This struck this little boy, apparently John, he was pretty upset. He went and talked to his teacher about it. He decided he was going to do something about it. He thought it would take about $70 to drill a well.

                                           01:22                   So he did extra chores and he saved up and got $70 and he was going to bring it to whoever, I don’t know how he gets ahold of people who build wells and they said, oh, I’m so sorry. The real cost is about $2,000. Now, John, I think he might say, well, that is way too big. Way too much. Kind of like a David and Goliath too story. I think what the Lord sees in Ryan, he doesn’t yet see in himself, but I guess he thought, why not me? So this little boy starts saving up his money and fundraising and he built his first well in Uganda when he was seven. It’s been over 25 years now, John, and the Ryan’s Well Foundation, get this, has completed over 1500 well projects, bringing safe water to more than one million people.

John Bytheway:               02:15                   Wow. Just because a teacher said some people don’t have water and that struck something in his heart.

Hank Smith:                      02:23                   His little heart said, I can do something about that. It’s pretty fantastic. And John, not only that, but the foundation has raised over a million dollars and also builds now latrines, keeping them a safe distance from water. Pretty incredible story. You might look at that little boy and think, well, that’s not the guy that’s going to change a million lives and give them fresh water. So the question is what’s happening in his heart. Man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart.

John Bytheway:               02:53                   The Lord’s like, yeah, I actually have a six-year-old who’s going to change the world a little bit in Africa. I’ll start working on this. Over 1,500 wells.

Hank Smith:                      03:04                   We do that. I know, John, you love the verse, “Let no man despise thy youth.” That’s kind of a similar verse. Don’t anybody think, well, you’re young, you can’t do anything.

John Bytheway:               03:13                   Yeah, exactly. And so many examples of those that are young. In fact, in the Old Testament, we looked at Samuel who’s only 10 and going to be more examples as we go through all of the standard works.

Hank Smith:                      03:23                   The next time you see someone and you kind of discount them by their appearance, you might remember the Lord looks on the heart. Hey, we hope you’ll join us on our full podcast. It’s called followHIM. You can get it wherever you get your podcast. We are with Dr. Geoff Wright this week. He does a masterful job with these chapters and John, if you remember, he tells a story about him and his son up in the mountains in the snow that you do not want to miss. And then come back here next week. We’ll do another followHIM Favorites.