As a young Kenyan boy, Charles Mully woke up in his hut to find that his family had abandoned him. For 10 years, he begged on the streets to survive.
“I became hard,” Mully says. “I became full of hatred. I became a street boy.”
Mully hated his life, and he wanted to commit suicide. At his lowest point, a young man invited him to a church for prayer and fellowship. While he was sitting and listening to the preacher, the preacher said, “Work hard, and by faith, there is nothing impossible before God.”
“That struck in my mind, and a new hope was planted in my heart,” Mully says.
The next morning, Mully began walking to Nairobi “to get a new life.” He didn’t have any money, but after he had knocked on many doors in a rich part of Nairobi, a kind Indian woman took him in, fed him, gave him a place to sleep and let him eat any leftovers in the house in exchange for him scrubbing the floors.
Eventually, the woman talked to her husband, who gave him a job and made him a manager of over 800 workers on a farm. He fell in love with one of the workers, and they married.
While he was working there, he saved enough money to buy a bus and would charge a minimal amount for transportation. As the demand for rides increased, he bought more buses and formed Mullyways, a transportation company.
He continued to buy more businesses and make more money until he supplied the western region of Kenya with all of its gas and oil.
“When I remember that, I see the impossible becoming possible,” he says.
One day when he was conducting business in the city, he was confronted by some street boys who asked for money to “protect” his Mercedes-Benz. He didn’t give them money, and he walked away. When he came back, his Mercedes was gone.
The incident haunted him, but not because his Mercedes was stolen. It haunted him because he saw himself in those street boys. Over the next few weeks, he had trouble focusing and working.
“I was really tormented by these boys in the street,” he says. “I could not work anymore.”
Finally, he had it out with God for four hours while sitting alone in his car.
“I cried—questioning God, ‘Why have you done this to me?'” he says. “With all the wealth that I had, why is it that God wanted me to take me back again to poverty? And then, after four hours, he took me down. I said, ‘Yes, God. Use me.’ The moment I said, ‘Yes, God,’ I got the greatest joy in my heart.”
That night after listening to each of his eight kids relay the highlights of their day to him at the dinner table, Mully announced to his family, “”I will never, ever do business again. I will never, ever work for money.”
His kids and wife sat in disbelief, and when he sold all of his businesses, his friends thought he was crazy. Very shortly afterward, he started bringing home kids off the street, and his wife took care of them. The number of kids in their home quickly jumped from the couple’s eight biological children to over 100 “adopted children.”
And that’s where the story of his journey with Christ began. It is a journey filled with miracles.
Mully’s obedience to his call is so radical that his church kicked him out. His friends thought he was crazy, and his family questioned whether he loved them. But through it all, Mully did it with God, and God showed Mully how to do things that everybody else thought was impossible.
Mully says, “It is not me. It’s God who called me.”
You can watch this stirring movie here. {eoa}
Rob Vischer is a freelance writer for Charisma Media.
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