Viola was kidnapped when she was just six years old. 

Walking alone to check on her family's garden in rural Uganda, she was approached by a man wielding a machete. He said two words: "Follow me."

In reflection, she knows she could have screamed or run, but she had the awareness to know she was isolated in the rugged Ugandan landscape. She could have run, yes, but the bush around her was more dangerous than the man in front of her. So she made a rational calculation: "I was like, Okay. I guess we’re doing this."

The man drove her to a Christian foster home. Today, her memories are sketchy, but she remembers working from morning until night, making paper beads sold internationally for profit. Discipline was swift and physical. 

Half a world away in Fort Worth, Texas, God was already writing a different ending.

In Texas, a woman named Sharon accompanied her friend on a trip to Uganda to visit orphaned children. At the foster home, she met Viola and felt an unmistakable pull of the Spirit, and she returned home with Viola's name, and told her husband she, too, wanted to adopt a child.

He wasn't convinced because their four children were nearly grown. He agreed to pray about it, but he was also ready for life in an empty nest. 

Sharon immediately began encountering unmistakable signs. During the greet your neighbor moment at church, a woman turned around and introduced herself to Sharon’s husband as Viola. Sharon’s husband had attended that church for years and had never seen her before. In the years since, they’ve never seen her again. Then, driving home from work one day, he looked up and saw a billboard with a message that said: Adopt Viola.

From that moment on, Sharon and her husband worked full time to adopt Viola.

As the adoption process unfolded, troubling patterns emerged. Money sent for Viola’s care never reached her. Then they discovered she wasn’t an orphan as much as she was a kidnapping victim. In fact, the man with the machete worked for the foster home, which, upon investigation, was trafficking children for profit.

They obtained temporary guardianship and moved Viola to a boarding school. Months of paperwork and court hearings followed, and slowly, the door opened.

When Viola's plane landed in Texas, a crowd of friends, family, and church members waited with signs and flowers. "I didn't know what love was," she says. "But I felt it that day."

Soon, her new parents took her to church where she began to understand that the safety she'd felt in the Catholic church as a little girl in Uganda wasn't just a reflection of the building. It was a reflection of God’s grace and protection.  

"It was like a light went off in my head. Oh, so this is who has been protecting me. This is who has been orchestrating my life."

In 2019, Viola returned to Uganda for the first time in ten years. Standing outside her childhood home, she began to cry. "I remember just sitting in the back of the car afterwards, just crying. And I was like, 'Wow, God. You took me out of this. You brought me home.'"

Today, Viola is twenty-three, studying for the MCAT and preparing to apply to medical school. She wants to care for children in the same way someone cared for her.

"I always joke that I had it easy," she says. "Not that my life was easy, but because I had so many challenges, it's so easy for me to just take that road to God. It's so much easier for me, who has gone through so much, to automatically be like, 'Okay, well, there's literally no other way, no other thing for me, other than the Lord.'"

This is Kingdom Come. Not a program, but an invitation to let Jesus' grace increasingly rule our hearts so that good news multiplies from every heart and every home, beginning with ours.

For Viola, that meant God ruling over the terror of abandonment while turning it into rescue. 

The beauty of this story isn’t lost on Viola. As a child, a strange man with a machete demanded that she follow him, and she had no choice. For Viola, she says that when Jesus asked her to follow Him, she never hesitated. After all, “why would I choose anything else?”

What area of your heart is Jesus inviting you to surrender today? Because Viola's story proves this: when we say yes to His rule, good news doesn't just stay in our hearts—it multiplies. It ripples to families we'll never meet, to villages we'll never visit, to futures we can't imagine.

Kingdom Come starts with one person in one moment saying, "Okay, Lord. Have Your way." That's how a girl in a garden becomes a future doctor. That's how obedience in Texas changes a life in Uganda. That's how God's Kingdom blooms from every heart … starting with yours.