Burned Out and Broken
By 1995, Heidi Baker had been a missionary for 20 years. She and her husband Rolland had worked in Asia and the UK, running themselves into the ground. She was exhausted, disillusioned, and questioning whether any of it mattered.
Then she attended a conference in Toronto where something shifted. She described an encounter with God that left her on the floor for days -- not dramatically, but quietly. She said she heard one instruction: "Go to the poorest of the poor."
She chose Mozambique, one of the poorest countries on earth, ravaged by decades of civil war.
Starting With Nothing
The Bakers arrived in Maputo with almost no funding. They took over an abandoned government orphanage with 320 children. The conditions were catastrophic: no running water, no electricity, malaria everywhere, and children sleeping on concrete floors.
Heidi did not build a strategic plan. She simply started feeding children. One meal at a time. She sat on the ground with them, ate what they ate, and held the ones who were sick.
Within a year, the orphanage had grown. Within a decade, Iris Global (their ministry) had planted over 10,000 churches across Mozambique, established feeding programmes reaching thousands of children, and built schools, medical clinics, and wells.
What Changed Her
Heidi said the transformation was not in what she did for Mozambique but in what Mozambique did to her. "I learned to stop for the one," she wrote. "Not the crowd, not the programme, not the strategy. The one person in front of me."
She described feeding a dying child who looked into her eyes and smiled. "In that moment, I saw Jesus looking back at me. Not in the theology. In the child."
What This Means for You
Burnout is not the end of your story. Heidi found her deepest encounter with God after she had nothing left to give. Sometimes God meets you most powerfully when you have stopped performing and started simply being present with the person in front of you.