Thus far the Lord has helped us

If you read through the Old Testament, you'll notice that the Israelites seemed rather fond of setting up altars and stones and monuments just about everywhere they went.  They built them after crossing the Jordan, after hearing the 10 commandments, and after God came to them in dreams.  In a world before blogs and facebook newsfeeds, people needed a way to remember events.  So they would set up these stones in certain places, and seeing the stones would remind them of the laws God gave them in this place, or the dream God planted in that place. 

My favorite story of one of these stone piles is in 1 Samuel 7.  The Philistines are about to attack the Israelites, so Samuel instructs them to cry out to God, and God saves them.  To make sure they always remember how God rescued them in that place, Samuel builds one of those stone altars:  "Then Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Shen. He named it Ebenezer, saying, 'Thus far the Lord has helped us.'" (1 Samuel 7:12)  "Ebenezer" translates as "stone of help."  Every time the Israelites saw that stone after that, they remembered that it was called "stone of help" because God had helped them and brought them that far.

Right now, it's very easy for me to remember just how far God has brought me over the past few months.  It's almost overwhelming when I think about it because of how fresh it all still is. 

But I know it won't always be so fresh, so I want to raise my own Ebenezer to remind myself of what God's done in my life when the dust has been scrubbed from my feet and my suitcases are back in storage.  I want a visual that I can look at and say wow--look at how much God helped me. 

So today, I took some time to pick out pictures from my trip that illustrate how God is my helper.  I made a collage with these pictures, the boarding passes from my first solo flight, and a printout of 1 Samuel 7:12.  This collage will hang on my wall, and no matter how far from Kenya I feel here, I can look at this and truly say "Thus far the Lord has helped me."

I'm not who I was

One of Brandon Heath’s first big hits was a song called “I’m Not Who I Was.” Those lyrics have been running through my head as I’ve been reflecting on my time in Kenya and Uganda this summer and prepare to fly home tonight.

I didn’t expect to change so much. I’ve been to Kenya twice already, so I didn’t think I’d experience anything drastically different enough to really change me. But it’s impossible to get on an airplane alone, flying into the unknown, and stay the same. It’s impossible to move in with strangers who become family for five weeks and stay the same. It’s impossible to give your heart to a hundred children and have it shattered time and again as you learn their stories and stay the same. It’s impossible to face one fear after another until you’re no longer afraid and stay the same. It’s impossible to follow the call of a living, loving God and stay the same.

As always, I am leaving a part of my heart here in Kenya.  It’s a larger piece this time, so it’s harder to leave this time, but I can’t wait to get back and share even more stories with friends and family in my first home.  And I’ll be praying for time to pass quickly until God calls me back to my second home.

The thing I find most amazing in amazing grace
Is the chance to give it out.
Maybe that’s what life is all about.

Prayer and Praise

I need to start this post with a prayer request.  There was a fire early this morning local time at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, the only international airport in Nairobi, which gutted the international arrivals hall and temporarily shut down the airport.  It has since been re-opened for domestic and cargo flights, and may start to accept international flights tomorrow morning.  Please pray for the team from my church, which is supposed to arrive at JKIA on Friday night, and for those of us who are scheduled to leave for Uganda via JKIA on Sunday afternoon.  Pray that the airport would be reopened to international arrivals by Friday night, and international departures by Sunday, so that we can continue the work God has called us to here in East Africa.

And now, my blog post as I intended to post it before today’s excitement:

I’ve been called many things for coming to Kenya and volunteering here on my own this summer.  I’ve been called brave, but I can assure you I am the biggest coward I know.  I go out of my way to avoid awkward situations, meeting new people makes me nervous every time, and I take the Metro whenever I go into DC because I’m scared to drive there.  I nearly threw up on the plane ride here, but not because of turbulence.  I was scared witless of coming to a place in Kenya I’d never been, all alone.  But I have a courageous God who reminded me that he was already at the Tania Centre, preparing a place for me there.  I have a courageous God who puts incredible new people in my life here who are so easy to be comfortable around.  I have a God who is courageous even when I am not.

I’ve been called amazing and inspirational, but all I’ve been doing is the one thing I wanted to do most this summer.  Who thinks they’re amazing just for doing exactly what they want to do for an entire summer?  I think I’m truly being spoiled!  But I have a God who molds my heart to be more like his, and then delights in giving me the desires of my heart.  I just have the privilege of following these desires the whole way to Kenya.  And I have a God who came to earth to give an example of how to live with each other—He is the true inspiration.  I am just making a feeble attempt to imitate the life Jesus lived in the places He calls me to.

I’ve been called loving and caring, and these I may agree with.  I have had a life filled with so much love from my family and friends that I can’t help but let it spill over into the lives of those around me.  But, most of all, I have a God who loved me first and showed me how to truly love others.  I have a God who’s cared for me in every rough patch in my life so that I know how to care for others in their tough times.  I have a God who touched lepers and had dinner with prostitutes, and he helps me to fall in love with these children even when they smell like feces or spit at me when I sit near them.  It’s something I can’t help doing.

Somehow, my five weeks at the Tania Centre have flown by.  I leave in less than two days to meet the team from my church in Nairobi, where we will split into two groups. One group will remain in Nairobi to give a children’s ministry training to a group of church leaders from around Kenya, and my group will leave for Uganda to give a sports ministry training to church leaders there.  I’m terribly sad to be leaving these children whom I love so much, but I can’t wait to see friends from back home, and I can’t wait to see how God uses their time here to touch even more lives.

Once the rest of my team arrives, I’ll be posting less, but you can also find our team blog at 2013missions.wordpress.com.  Please come follow the rest of the journey there!

Counting the hairs on our heads and the threads in our needles

God tells us that he counts the number of hairs on our heads, and he knows when even a tiny sparrow falls.  It shouldn’t surprise me when he plans something seemingly insignificant that turns into something huge, but it certainly delights me when I get to see it happen.  At Tania this summer, it was a simple sewing kit:  a handful of needles, a few spools of thread, a thread clipper, a needle threader, and a divine appointment.

The sewing kit was a last-minute addition to my packing list at the end of June.  I didn’t think I’d need it, but I had a nagging thought in my head that I should bring it.  It was so small, it seemed silly to leave it at home.  And after all, it would be nice to have in case I got a hole in my jeans while in Kenya.  I anticipated that it would stay in my suitcase the entire trip, but God had bigger plans for this tiny sewing kit.

One of the first things I noticed about the children here at Tania, after how joyful and loving they were, was how full their clothes were of easily fixed holes and tears.  I made a mental note to find out about mending the clothes of the children who stayed at the school for the August holidays once school was out.  What a great use of the sewing kit that I thought I wouldn’t need!

But God thinks even bigger than that—the social worker asked me if I would teach a mending class to some of the older girls during the August holiday.  Of course I would!  I’m no seamstress, but I could at least teach them how to thread a needle and make a finishing knot, if nothing else.

Mending classes have been so much more than I ever expected.  The first day, I had one of my class 4 girls, Sarah, watch me mend two jackets.  The next day, a few more children brought me clothes, so I set Sarah up with a needle & thread, and she mended alongside me.  The next day, we had a pile of clothes nose-high on our table, and there were 5 of us doing the mending.  Sarah was even helping me teach the newcomers what to do.

Our table in the back corner of the dining hall was a crazy mess of thread, needles, confusion, and pride this week as everyone who wanted learned how to fix their clothes.  No matter how easy the job or how many pieces of clothing a child had fixed, she still shouted “Teacher!  Look!” every time she completed a job.  And it brought me such joy to reward her for a job well done with a smile and praise, no matter how many times or how uneven the stitching.

Unless it’s THIS uneven.  This one I had to take away from the child and bring it home to pull the needle back through and undo all of the stitching.  If you like mazes, this would have been a fun puzzle for you.  But oh, that child gave it his all.

We’ve also had to improvise—my needle threader broke the first time I used it, so for a while I used the tiny piece of metal from the tip by itself to thread needles.  That eventually broke, too, so we’ve been threading needles the old-fashioned way (squinting your eyes & screwing up your face while you try to poke the thread through that impossibly small hole) ever since.  On Thursday, I spent a solid 40 minutes doing nothing but threading needles for the girls.

I also didn’t bring a pin cushion, and that many people and clothes at one table resulted in many, many needles on the floor.  I dug through my suitcases, searching for what I could use, and came up with a wrist band from last year’s sport camp.  It has been the perfect pin cushion!

I’ve really enjoyed these mending sessions with my girls so much more than I ever thought I would.  It warms my heart to see these children doing something concrete to make their lives better, and taking such pride in their work.  Even those who can’t physically use a needle and thread themselves love sitting with us and passing the thread clippers or needles to whoever needs them.  It has been a huge blessing for these children to learn a skill they so badly need, and it has been an even bigger blessing for me to watch them learn.  It was all possible because the God who counts the hairs on my head knew to tell me to bring a simple sewing kit to Kenya.