The selfless work of missionaries was poignantly illustrated by the terrorist murder on Jan. 15 of 45-year-old Michael Riddering, an orphanage director in West Africa.

Riddering and his wife, Amy, left Hollywood, Fla., in 2011 to minister to impoverished children and widows in the landlocked nation of Burkina Faso. Unicef estimates that in the country of 17 million people, almost one million are orphans. The Ridderings, who brought their young daughter with them to the town of Yako, adopted two Burkinabe children; the orphanage cared for about 400 more.

Riddering was visiting Ouagadougou, the capital about 70 miles from Yako, late last week. He was meeting with a Burkinabe pastor in the Cappuccino Café when al Qaeda terrorists attacked the restaurant and two nearby hotels. More than two-dozen people, including Riddering and six Canadians in the country on short-term missions, were killed.

In addition to operating the orphanage Les Ailes de Refuge for the Christian mission organization Sheltering Wings, Riddering had also opened a women’s crisis center and ran a school, according to the Miami Herald.

Read the article “The Missionary Killed by Islamist Terror” on google.com.