Teen passionate to help others, globally and locally

Kim named Moriah, now 19, for the mountain in the Bible where Abraham almost sacrificed his son Isaac. After the voice of God commanded Abraham to spare his son and a ram appeared as an alternative sacrifice, Abraham named the place “The Lord Will Provide.”

When Kim heard a sermon about that story, the message stuck. At the time, she had only given birth to one child, Moriah’s older sister. Because of a chronic pain condition, she did not believe she would have any more children.

“I felt God saying, ‘You will lay her on the altar, and I will provide,’” Kim says of her realization that having more children was not impossible.

Perhaps that meant a miscarriage, she thought. Or maybe a young death.

But then, as a 5-year-old, Moriah shared with her parents a dream she had about becoming a missionary. It clicked for Kim. For her, placing Moriah on a figurative altar meant giving her up to mission work.

The family encouraged Moriah cautiously, not sure whether the interests of a 5-year-old would persist.

They did.

“We looked for an opportunity to get Moriah out of the country,” Kim says. “We always believed in her and wanted to get her there to see if it would pan out.”

Since then, Moriah has worked hard in Tucson and internationally to care for other people, taking on both labor-intensive jobs and creative projects.

As a 10-year-old, she went on a trip to Kenya with her father.

“On the trip, I fell in love with the culture,” she says. “I just loved spending time there and the smells and what everything looked like.”

Moriah returned to Kenya in 2010 as a 13-year-old to help build new dormitories and classrooms for Deaf Opportunity OutReach International, an organization that translates the Bible into sign languages and trains deaf leaders.

She has also traveled to the Dominican Republic with the Christ Community Church youth group, where the group built brick walls for a second-story classroom and ran a vacation Bible school for kids.

“We learned how to lay the blocks and mix the mortar, and it was all on the second story, so we had to pull up all of these blocks,” she says.

During the vacation Bible school, a young boy attached himself to Moriah. After learning that the boy lived with his older sister because his mother had died and his father worked in another city, Moriah decided to sponsor him through Kids Alive International. They now write each other letters and he sends crafts.

Moriah has since traveled to Mexico and the Navajo Reservation for similar construction projects. She finished high school in May 2015 and hopes to serve as a missionary full time someday.

“I believe there are a lot of people hurting out there, and they need to feel healing and love from that, and I believe I know the answer to true love and healing, which is through Jesus Christ,” Moriah says.

Because she wants to back her faith with actions and not just words, she joined Hearts on Fire, a local youth ministry that works specifically in the Tucson community, feeding the homeless, visiting nursing homes and doing construction projects.

Wanderlust can make it hard to stay here, but Moriah is learning to be content and care for people everywhere.

“I think I have a better perspective now that this is still my training ground,” she says, “and there are things I need to do here before I can go and do elsewhere.”