www.nashvillerescuemission.org Mission Matters Britt Nicole: Helping THe lOST geT FOUnD By Adria Haley “It has been a long-held conviction that children have no place in war. To make it a reality once more, we need only to match the will of those who do evil with our own will to do good.” —P.W. Singer, Children at War Most people would agree that children—regardless of their birthplace or the dialect they first learn to speak— have no place in war. Children are to be nurtured, taught, loved and protected. The very sad and sobering reality is that there is an estimated 300,000 child soldiers in the world today (and that number continues to increase)—many with tiny limbs barely the length of an AK-47. In Central and Eastern Africa, boys and girl—as young as 5 or 6 years old—have been taken by force during violent raids on their villages by rebel groups, such the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). The boys are then taken to camps in the bush where they are trained to kill; girls are often kept as sex slaves or “wives” of rebel group members. Britt Nicole, North Carolina-born singer-songwriter— well-known for her latest album release “The Lost Get Found”—has seen with her own eyes and felt with her own heart the pain and tears of these African children who have been abducted and forced to be child soldiers (sometimes even forced to kill their own parents or siblings). In 2009, Britt met Amanda Lawrence of Visiting Orphans and Bethany Haley, co-founder of eXile international, at an event where she was performing in Nashville, Tennessee. Amanda and Bethany were leading and planning a trip to Uganda for both organizations in January 2010 and asked Britt to come along. She never had been on an international mission trip and wanted to make sure it was God’s will for her to go—amid a busy tour schedule—before committing. She decided to pray about it for a bit. Several weeks later, when Britt grabbed a book from her shelf that she’d been hoping to find the time to read, an eXile international business card with a note from Bethany fell from the pages of the book. The book was Tom Davis’ 30 CCM