Dr. James Culberson is a neurology professor at the University of West Virginia. He and his wife adopted Sarah when she was only one year old and she was outgoing from the beginning. She grew up knowing she was adopted, a black girl with white parents, and at age 28 decided to seek her biological parents. What she learned turned her life upside down. She found that her mother had died when Sarah was 11 and that her father still lived in Sierra Leone. And she discovered that she is a mahaloi, a princess of the Mende tribe, responsible for the village of Bumpe, Sierra Leone. Royalty brought not wealth, but responsibility.

In 2006, Sarah visited Bumpe and hundreds turned out to welcome her. A decade long civil war had devastated the region. Children were impoverished, missing limbs, orphaned, desolate and destitute. Culberson’s dreams of acting and dancing went by the wayside as she began working with her biological brother to begin a foundation. They rebuilt the high school and began promoting education in the country. The foundation dug wells for clean drinking water and has spun off other initiatives. Sarah Culberson has assumed the responsibilities of a princess and is actively seeking to make lives better. She has bridged two worlds to bring life and hope and joy. That’s the work of the children of the king.

“How great is the love the Father has lavished on us that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not been made known. But we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:1-2 NIV).

Those who obey the gospel of Jesus Christ are children of the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. We are royalty, princes and princesses subordinate to the everlasting throne of God. But that position does not bring us wealth and luxury, servants and territories. It brings us responsibility to live and act and serve as our Father, the King, does. That means we are to bring life and hope and joy to others, to declare the gospel, to open the kingdom to adopt ever more sons and daughters so that life and hope and joy will continue to expand across the world.

We have the commission to bridge two worlds: the earthly and the spiritual. A bitter war has left legions of deeply wounded souls scarred by sin. Those who are outside the kingdom of God are hopeless, damaged, hurting and deprived of any future. We have the opportunity and responsibility to rebuild this horribly damaged world, to restore light in the darkness and help these souls to find a life that truly and deeply satisfies the aching soul. We are princes and princesses, charged with extending the reign of our Father, the King. We carry good news for a world that is in despair of ever hearing genuinely good news. We can change this world; that’s what we do when we are royalty.