Growing up, I never really knew people who had dealt with real persecution. I grew up in a pretty safe town where I never had to worry about discrimination or persecution due to my faith. I would hear stories on the news about those things, but they seemed worlds away.  I had absolutely no personal experience that would even come close to what so many Christians around the world are dealing with on a daily basis.

About 9 years ago, my world broadened exponentially. I started teaching at a school where many of my students were refugees from Burma or Thailand. My very first teaching experience was with early elementary ESL (English as a Second Language) students during summer school. This group of kids was made up of mostly refugee students who spoke either Burmese or another dialect called Karen. My teaching aide was an incredible man who I still work with that was also from Burma. Most of those kids lived in a kind of poverty I have never seen. During that summer, I grew to love those kids and learned so much from my aide about the world in Burma and Thailand (where many of the Burmese live in refugee camps). He would tell stories of life in the jungles of Burma, how corrupt many of the soldiers were, and of how he and his wife escaped the dangers and horrors of that country. During that time I developed a compassion I had never had before for the people I use to pass judgement over.

When given the opportunity to review Reload Love: Transforming Bullets to Beauty and Battlegrounds to Playgrounds, I was intrigued after reading what it is about. Reload love chronicles the journey of the author, Lenya Heitzig, as she steps into creating her ministry called Reload love. This ministry was born when the author saw the atrocities happening to refugees and innocent children half a world away as she watched the news from the safety of her own comfortable home. That became a springboard for her to start a ministry that would eventually bring her into the heart of the war-torn middle east and into Burma and Thailand, something that has transformed her life forever.

Reload Love ministers into the hurting people of so many countries ravaged by war. They now make and sell jewelry that is manufactured from spent bullet casings. They also fund the building of playgrounds that are built in areas that have been annihilated due to battles or ISIS attacks in order for children to be able to have a place to, even for a moment, forget about the atrocities they have seen and just play.

This book is such an eye opener for me and anyone who reads it. So many of us live safe, relatively easy lives here in America, and don’t even have a clue about the violence and fear so many people live in.  I recommend that every person who sits in a suburban church every Sunday, never experiencing what it feels like to live in fear, read this book. We all need to have our eyes opened to the suffering going on in our world.

If you would like to enter to win a copy of your own go here.