Becky Murray: I think as long as our eyes are constantly fixed on Him, that makes all the difference, because it takes your eyes off the mountain and puts them on the One who can move those mountains.
What God Will Do If We Just Say Yes: Becky Murray & Andrea Kazindra – Episode #464
Narrator: Welcome to the Jesus Calling Podcast. This week, we get to hear from Becky Murray, the founder and CEO of One By One, an organization committed to ending exploitation and bringing freedom to vulnerable children around the world. Becky’s journey began with a simple desire to fight injustice—a passion that eventually led her from her dreams of a law career to the front lines of global humanitarian work. Becky shares how a pair of pink flip-flops sparked a lifelong mission and why she believes that even small acts of kindness can change the world—one life at a time.
Later in the episode, we’ll hear from Andrea Kazindra, co-founder and co-CEO of Musana, a Ugandan-led organization transforming communities through schools, hospitals, and businesses. What began as a college internship turned into a lifelong commitment to creating sustainable, locally-driven change. Nearly two decades later, Andrea continues to lead with humility, vision, and a deep belief in the power of community.
Let’s begin with Becky’s story.
Becky Murray: Hey, I’m Becky Murray, and I’m the founder and CEO of an organization called One By One where we are super passionate about ending exploitation and seeing children come into complete freedom.
I come from the North of England, which is why I don’t talk quite as posh as the Queen once did—in the North of England, we’re known for our Northern tones. My mum and dad just loved Jesus, and I was brought up pretty much living in the church.
As a young girl, I was always super passionate about tackling injustice. Injustice for me was like the red rag to a bull. My mum and dad would even tease me that I would count how many chips were on my plate because as the youngest of three siblings, my older sisters always got the larger portions, which I was furious about because my loves in life are Jesus and food. [As I was] becoming a teenager, I thought I would become a lawyer and tackle injustice that way.
While I was out on a mission trip to Romania, I felt God speak to me for the first time about helping to establish some sort of a safe place for vulnerable children, and that completely changed the whole trajectory of my life. And so as it stands today, I am now fighting injustice but in a very different way from what I thought it would be when I was a young girl.
Even If It’s Only for One Child
I went on this journey where I had gotten this promise that God had spoken to me in Romania, but then what do you do with this promise? I went on this thirteen year kind of waiting for God’s promises to unfold in my life. So during that time, I would go on short-term mission trips to learn from other people, and one such trip was going to Sierra Leone with my local church in 2006. I was working alongside an evangelist, and I would do these large feeding programs at the same time.
On this particular day, I met a little girl who was nine years old. She was an orphan living on the streets, and she would just beg to make it from day to day. One of the things that moved me was that she simply had no shoes. Now, I work in a lot of remote parts of Africa, and I now see that’s quite commonplace across different parts of Africa. But this was one of my first trips there, and I was just so moved to see a little girl who didn’t even own a pair of shoes. On that particular day, I had a grand total of fifty pence, which is not even a dollar. I was a student at the time, so I was broke. I’d used all my money to get on the mission trip in the first place. With my very feeble offering of fifty pence, I bartered with the market stall owner and managed to buy little nine-year-old Felicity a pink pair of flip-flops to match the pink top she was wearing.
I’ll never forget… I looked up the hill and I saw Felicity running down towards us. She’s got a huge smile on her face because for the first time in her life she’s now wearing shoes. She turned to me and said, “Should I wait in the hotel?” So I said, “No, we’re just going on to the gospel campaign now. There’s space in the vehicles. You’re welcome to join us.” And she said, “Yes, but shouldn’t I wait in your bedroom?”
I genuinely couldn’t comprehend what the question was. Here’s a nine-year-old girl looking at another young girl—I was in my early twenties at the time. And coming from a beautiful Christian background, I had such an overprotective dad, such a loving home environment that I couldn’t process her question. So I asked her a third time, and sure enough she thought that I’d spent fifty pence on her so that I could then have sex with her. And that moment just utterly broke me.
At that moment, I remember looking at Felicity in the eyes, but I was having a conversation with God, and the conversation was this, “I’m all in. Even if it’s only ever for one child, I’ll give my whole life to this because no human should ever be bought or sold.”
When We Offer a Little, We Do A Lot
The reality is when you look at the vast needs out there, it can be overwhelming. The thought that there are fifty million people currently trapped in slavery today—I can’t help fifty million people. The temptation is because I can’t fix it all, I’ll shrink back and do nothing at all. It sometimes feels like when I look out at the ocean of need before us, it feels like I’ve got a teaspoon in my hand, and I’m attempting to empty an ocean. But the reality is, for example, God never asked the little boy to feed the 5,000. He just asked him to hand over the fish and the bread in his hands. It’s the same with our lives where God doesn’t ask us to go and feed the 5,000, but what is in our hands that we can make an impact with today. Maybe that looks like a pair of fifty pence flip-flops, but every single one of us can do something to reach the one in front of us today.
“The temptation is because I can’t fix it all, I’ll shrink back and do nothing at all. It sometimes feels like when I look out at the ocean of need before us, it feels like I’ve got a teaspoon in my hand, and I’m attempting to empty an ocean. God doesn’t ask us to go and feed the 5,000, but what is in our hands that we can make an impact with today.” – Becky Murray
I think back then as an early twenty something year old that if God had talked to me about the thousands we would now be working with, I would have shrunk back. I would have said, “That’s too big. It’s too hard. Ask somebody else.” But one life, I can deal with that. I can help my neighbor. And the reality is that so many times we see Jesus doing that, where He stops for one life—the woman at the well, the lady with the issue of blood, the widow in name. So many times He stops for one person, and in doing so, we see their whole communities or their whole towns transformed. That’s very much our heartbeat—that if we would just have eyes to see the needs of the ones that God brings across our path day in and day out, and if we just constantly have this heart of, Who today can I reach, who’s my neighbor today? every day, we can see a big impact in and through our lives.
“If we would just have eyes to see the needs of the ones that God brings across our path day in and day out, and if we just constantly have this heart of, Who today can I reach, who’s my neighbor today? every day, we can see a big impact in and through our lives.” – Becky Murray
That’s actually why we call the organization One By One. We’ve got incredible staff around the world that are running our centers. I see the change in their life. I see the kids who were supposed to not make it even past elementary education because they were so ill. And yet, after encountering the love of Christ and being given the help and the medical care that they needed, they’re now graduating around the world. To see the difference that God has made in their lives is what helps keep us motivated to keep reaching that next one.
“We’ve got incredible staff around the world that are running our centers. I see the kids who were supposed to not make it even past elementary education because they were so ill. And yet, after encountering the love of Christ and being given the help and the medical care that they needed, they’re now graduating around the world. To see the difference that God has made in their lives is what helps keep us motivated to keep reaching that next one.” – Becky Murray
In Kenya, we’ve been running a center out there for over a decade now. It’s a residential center, primary education, secondary education. We also do medical care, and we’ve planted several churches in the village where we’re located there. Over in Pakistan, it looks very different. For children that are born into bonded labor [were] making bricks all day, every day in the heat of the sun. We built a safe house out there and gave them full-time education.
Once they are adults, they can go on and gain legitimate employment, rather than going back into forced labor. Over in Uganda, we’re building a brand new center. We’ve been working there for a couple of years now doing a lot of our prevention work. We’ve now reached over 47,000 children across more than ten different countries, and it’s just continuing to grow.
Living Life With Our Hands Outstretched
If I’m honest, my biggest challenge is sometimes the injustice and how brutal that is. In early 2021, we’d just gone through obviously the impact of COVID, and it had a massive impact on many different non-profit organizations or small businesses. At that moment in time, survival felt like success. Even in our own personal family, we were going through this really difficult season where life was just hard. I remember sitting in my office in 2021 and coming up with the master plan of survival. We’re not going to launch any new initiatives or take on any more staff. But then after coming up with this amazing master plan of survival, my phone rang and it was our outreach team in Pakistan, and they said, “Becky, there was a little girl in one of the factories who was three years old. Her name was Mercy and three-year-old Mercy was raped. So brutal was the attack that she didn’t survive it. She died as a result, and her little body was just left on the floor of the brick factory.”
I remember in that moment thinking, God, you can see the vulnerable place that One By One as an organization is in. All of a sudden, the story of the Good Samaritan [Luke 10:25-37] came to my mind where Jesus very wisely selects two people—a priest and a Levite, a pastor and a worship leader for modern-day translation. They genuinely would have thought they were serving the call of God in their life, but when the need arose, they simply chose to look the other way. And as I’d said in my heart, Not now God,I suddenly realized I was the priest in that moment, I was the Levite. And how dare I look the other way when a three-year-old has been raped and killed. It was probably one of my hardest moments in terms of saying yes to God. I remember calling our board and saying, “Okay, I just want you to know we’re gonna double our work in Pakistan.” One of them said, “Do we have a budget in place for that?” to which the answer was, “Not yet.” But we stepped out in faith because when there are needs like that, how can you turn the other way? Not only did I see God bring in all the finance that we needed in order to double the size of the safe house and double our outreach programming, we are building our first ever Mercy Center, which will be a crisis shelter especially for little girls going through what Mercy endured in Pakistan.
The reality is that if we would live our lives with our hands outstretched—rather than oftentimes the temptation is to live with our hands closed off, of “God, help me first, heal me first, heal my family first.” If we’d live with our hands open, saying, “Okay, God, I’m not perfect and maybe I’m still needing healing in certain parts of my own life, but despite all that, you can still flow through me if I just say yes.”
“Live with our hands open, saying, ‘Okay, God, I’m not perfect and maybe I’m still needing healing in certain parts of my own life, but despite all that, you can still flow through me if I just say yes.’” – Becky Murray
The challenges with One By One are continuous, whether it’s fighting corruption or whether it’s not having the income we need for the expansion that we’re doing, or whether it’s being broken ourselves through seeing just the hardship of what people go through. But while our eyes are on Him, He navigates us through and He provides all that we need. And all He’s looking for is our yes.
“While our eyes are on Him, He navigates us through and He provides all that we need. And all He’s looking for is our yes.” – Becky Murray
Narrator: To learn more about Becky Murray and One By One Organization, visit www.onebyone.org, and be sure to check out her new book, Embrace The Journey, at your favorite retailer.
Stay tuned to Andrea Kazindra’s story after a brief message.
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Our next guest is Andrea Kazindra. Andrea never imagined that a summer internship would turn into a lifelong calling. As a business student, she was originally drawn to the world of microfinance, but a trip to Uganda in 2008 changed everything. What started as a visit to an orphanage sparked the beginnings of what would become Musana, a social enterprise focused on creating sustainable, locally-driven solutions in Uganda.
Andrea Kazindra: My name is Andrea Kazindra, and I am a co-founder and co-CEO of an organization called Musana that works in Uganda. I’m also a mother. I have three biological children—ten, six, and one—and I have many, many children in Uganda that call me mother. It’s been a big blessing over the last seventeen years, mostly living in Uganda with my husband. We have had a lot of children looking up to us as parents, which has been a blessing.
I had grown up in a Christian home and was always told to be the hands and feet of Jesus. And somehow, I ended up in business school listening to all these lessons about profit maximization and making money. One day, I was sitting in a business class and my professor brought up a picture of Mohammed Yunus, who is the founder of the concept of microfinance,
and literally something just clicked in my head. I was like, This is what I want to learn about. I got online and literally searched, “How to go to Africa and learn microfinance” and an internship popped up. I applied, got accepted, and in the summer of 2008, I got on a plane to go to Uganda.
The Detour That Became the Destination
When I got to Uganda, my first impression was that poverty was everywhere. We stayed with a host family—no running water, no electricity, no paved roads, chickens running around the kitchen. I had grown up in the total opposite, in this big house with these big roads and everybody pulls into their garages and goes inside. I just was so inspired by the community. The culture is so slow and communal. It was so beautiful.
I was doing my microfinance internship and loving it. Every night, we would just sit on the patio and play clapping games and sing worship songs and be together.
Haril, who’s now my husband… we formed a friendship. One day I was asked by my program coordinator to visit an orphanage with him. The moment of walking in was a moment I will remember for the rest of my life. The conditions were so shocking: 160 kids, dirty, crowded together in this compound that was also the community’s trash dump. They had two toilets that were overflowing. I remember asking, “Where do the kids sleep?” And they brought me to these three tiny rooms with dirt floors, rocky and wet from the roof that would leak when it would rain. And I’m like, “Where are their beds? Where are their mattresses?” No beds, no mattresses. They sleep piled together in these rooms. And just the devastation, I mean, the hopelessness, the neglect—it was by far the hardest conditions I had ever seen. I actually went home that day and I wrote in my journal, God, why did you bring me to that place?
Musana Children’s Home Becomes a Reality
So basically, everything shifted. My whole internship was kind of thrown out the door, and I was given this massive responsibility of buying food and feeding 160 kids every day. Over the course of those few months, the kids became more than just kids that were abandoned or vulnerable, living in poverty, they became names and faces and personality. I just fell in love with them and started to uncover just layer after layer of abuse and corruption.
“The kids became more than just kids that were abandoned or vulnerable, living in poverty, they became names and faces and personality.” – Andrea Kazindra
The directors were receiving all this money from abroad and none of it was getting to the kids. One day, we made the decision that we were going to try and close that orphanage and move the kids to a safe place. That’s when Haril and another guy, Morris, that he was living with, stepped in. We eventually got the government to agree to give us half of the kids.
On September 16, 2008, we moved the first forty kids to Musana. A couple weeks later, we moved another forty kids. Haril and I had just turned twenty-one years old and became legal guardians and legally responsible for eighty kids. None of them spoke English, so we’d play games and sing songs. One of the songs that we taught them was “You Are My Sunshine,” and it became their favorite song. I remember asking Haril and Morris, “What is sunshine in the local language?” They said, “Musana,” and it became Musana Children’s Home—that is how we started.
Closing Doors to Open New Ones
A lot of people were benefiting by keeping the kids in those conditions. I started to get a lot of death threats. I literally had to leave my host family. They proceeded to tell me that I was too big of a risk to stay with them anymore. I had never been more scared in my life. Every time I felt like this is too big, this is impossible, I would remember, No, I can do this. God can do this. The orphanage that we took the kids from—I like to say that it was a tourist attraction [because] people would leave and send money and it would never reach the kids.
They say eighty percent of kids in orphanages worldwide are not orphans, right? So orphanages actually create orphans because it’s what the donors want to support. And so, we started to track them down, every single one of the eighty homes where these kids came from. We began to completely shift our model. We eventually closed the orphanage. We were constantly needing healthcare for the kids, and we could not find good quality healthcare in the community. I gave birth to our ten year old daughter in Uganda. I delivered in one of the best hospitals in Kampala and still had an incredibly difficult delivery. My daughter almost died. I almost died.
We built the hospital and it opened in 2015. Today, we have three hospitals. We’ve delivered thousands of babies safely. If a woman delivers a baby in one of Musana’s hospitals, it is four times more likely that the baby will survive than if the baby is born at another facility in Uganda.
“If a woman delivers a baby in one of Musana’s hospitals, it is four times more likely that the baby will survive than if the baby is born at another facility in Uganda.” – Andrea Kazindra
When Less Becomes So Much More
One thing that I’ve learned being in Uganda is that prayer can be a part of every day, throughout the day. The faith that Ugandans have, mostly because they’re so dependent on God… I think when you don’t have much and you don’t know what you’re going to feed your family next week, your reliance and trust has to be in God. I’ve learned this just by watching the faith of Ugandan people and their prayer life.
“One thing that I’ve learned being in Uganda is that prayer can be a part of every day, throughout the day. I think when you don’t have much and you don’t know what you’re going to feed your family next week, your reliance and trust has to be in God.” – Andrea Kazindra
Jesus Calling was probably one of the first devotionals I ever got in Uganda. My mom brought it for me on one of her first trips. I don’t have many books on my bookshelf in Uganda, but I have Jesus Calling. It just keeps me grounded, keeps me remembering what the purpose is. Like today, my devotional was Matthew 9—come to Him with all my burdens and weariness. They’ve definitely helped me get through some of the hardest times in my life. The only reason Musana is what it is today and has grown into what it is today is because it has had God’s hand in it.
“The only reason Musana is what it is today and has grown into what it is today is because it has had God’s hand in it.” – Andrea Kazindra
Narrator: To learn more about Andrea Kazindra and Musana, please visit www.musana.org.
Next time on the Jesus Calling Podcast, we’ll hear from DawnCheré Wilkerson, a pastor, speaker, and author. She opens up about her experience with infertility, and what to do when you ask God for something and receive the answer “not yet.”
DawnCheré Wilkerson: I’ve discovered the work and the wonder in the wait. I’ve discovered that my little surrender to a faithful God is so much more than I could ever dream. I think about the little boy who just gave his fish and his loaves, and it fed thousands. “God, I don’t have enough, but put in your hands, You’ll do more than I could ever dream.”
