Hiding our messes

"Beth!"

I turned and saw little James scooting towards me as quickly as he could across the grass, the biggest of grins across his face.  James, affectionately called Jim-o by everyone here, is a little boy who was born a few years ago to a mentally disabled teenager.  She was rescued from a bad living situation, along with James and his sister Jemimah, and now they live at the Tania Centre.  The mother was in the special needs class last year, and helps in the kitchen this year.  Jemimah is the most cheerful of toddlers, and I've never seen her with anything less than an absolutely beaming smile on her face.  You would never know what situation she came from by looking at her or interacting with her.

James, however, was born with some severe physical disabilities.  He is unable to walk on his own, so he scoots along the ground using his arms and legs.  He can walk for a few yards with assistance, but is incredibly wobbly.  Any physical exertion, even talking for too long, leaves him wheezing and gasping for breath.  A speech impediment makes talking even more difficult on top of the shortness of breath, making communication difficult for him at times.  Anything beyond just sitting requires so much more effort for James than it does for other children.

Some of the children here with disabilities try to hide their disabilities out of embarrassment.  Students with speech issues are quiet, students with unusable hands hide them under the desk during class.  But James doesn't let his disabilities keep him from being himself.  He has learned to propel himself across the ground almost as quickly as I can walk, and his speech impediment doesn't keep him from playing the "Beth!" "Jim-o!" game with me anytime I'm within shouting distance.  (He shouts "Beth!" at me, and I shout "Jim-o!" back at him, eliciting an enormous grin.  We go back and forth for quite some time, usually until I can't stand it anymore.  It's a very popular game here, with variations like the "Beth!" "Kanje!" game, the "Beth!" "Ndulu!" game, and the "Beth!" "Jemimah!" game.) 

James was so excited to see me when I walked past the dorm that he dropped what he was doing so he could scoot over to me just as quickly as he could, shouting as loudly as his breath allowed.  It didn't matter to him that I was already carrying one child and had three others hanging onto my arms, walking and talking with me without effort.  What mattered was that his Beth was here, and even if he had to scoot the entire length of the soccer field, he was going to come spend time with me.  He didn't need to have working legs or enough breath to carry on a conversation, he just needed to get close enough to be noticed.

If only we could come to Jesus with such abandonment of self.  Maybe our spiritual legs aren't working right now, and maybe we've lost the words to say.   Maybe we're embarrassed by how far behind other Christians we think we are, so we sit quietly beside the path as Jesus walks past.  We care more about how we look than about being with the One we love.

But Jesus wants us right now, no matter where we are in life.  When he told the parable of the prodigal son, the father didn't wait for the son to get his life together before welcoming him home.  He ran out to meet his son as soon as he saw him coming, probably still smelling of the pig sty he'd been working at, and embraced him as if no wrong had been done.  He didn't ask the son if he'd had a change of heart or if he was just flat broke (and, if you read the story, it wasn't a change of heart, it WAS that he was flat broke and out of options), and he didn't demand repayment or repentance.  He welcomed his son in that messy, smelly, broken state.

May we all come to fall so in love with Jesus that the need to be near him is so much greater than the need to hide all of our messes.  Even if it means we have to scoot along the ground to him, gasping his name.

Wewe ni wangu

"Betty, she said I'm hers!" Kanje giggled and hid her beaming face in my chest after shouting the news in Swahili to her friend.  I was practicing my Swahili, but meant every word:  "Wewe ni bebe wangu!" ("You are my baby!")  If I could bring this girl home with me next week, I would do it in a heartbeat.

Kanje can be a mystery to me at times.  Some days, I'll walk up to school and immediately hear her shout "Beth!" and come running the instant she sees me; other days, I seek her out and find her in a sullen mood, turning away with a "hmph!" if I try to talk to her.  Some days, she takes a swing at me if I try to hold her hand, and other days, she gets jealous if I let anyone but her sit in my lap.  But there is something about her that grabs my heart and won't let go, no matter where her mood swings take her.

Today was a good mood day, so Kanje sat on my lap, playing with me for a long time this afternoon.  She would hand me imaginary food, saying "Shika! Kula!" ("Take! Eat!").  Other phrases, too, which I've forgotten, meaning "close your eyes," usually followed by tiny fingers tickling my neck, and other things that I didn't understand, but laughed at on cue anyway.  Kanje helps me with my Swahili, I help her with her English, and we both come away feeling a little more loved than we did the day before.

I imagine God sees me in much the same way:  some days, I shout his name and run towards him with all my heart; other days, I feel God tapping on my shoulder, and I turn away.  Some days, I'm angry with God, and other days, I just want to spend the whole day sitting in his lap and talking with him.

But, no  matter where my mood swings take me, God will continue seeking me out.  There is something about me (and about you!) that grabs his heart and won't let go.  And he tells us, "Wewe ni toto wangu--you are my child."

My love is imperfect, but I hope Kanje sees that it is unconditional, and that it will help her to understand what it means when she learns that God's love is unconditional.  No matter how many times she turns from me, I'll still love her, and, no matter how many times she turns from him, God will still love her.  Maybe someday she'll be shouting the news to her friends:  "God said I'm his!"

Mighty to save

“She’s there,” Jennifer told me.  I peeked over her shoulder and saw the little girl I’d known last summer in class 4, sitting outside the shack she called home.  We’d come to her house outside Meru that day to try to rescue her and bring her back to Tania.

This girl’s mother is mentally challenged and unable to properly care for her daughters, which is why this little girl came to the Tania Centre in the first place.  Eventually, she asked to visit home.  It’s only natural for her to want to see her parents, no matter how poorly they had taken care of her.  But, when she went home for the December holidays last year, her parents never sent her back to school.  The Tania Centre has called several times asking when she’d return, always with the same answer: maybe next week.  But next week never came.

Which is how we ended up on the edge of her family’s property that Saturday, hoping to be invited in, hoping to bring her home with us.  There was no gate that we could see, so when the father allowed us to come in, we had to climb between the barbed wire to get in.  The house was a two-room shack, barely the size of my bedroom in my apartment in Virginia.  There was no electricity, no running water, and the latrine out back was built of sticks and plastic bags.  They had maybe half an acre of land, but it looked like little to no attempt had been made at farming it.  Piles of garbage, littered with empty liquor bottles, sat around the front of the house.

The little girl I’d known to be smiley and fiery-tempered last year sat on a log in front of the house, picking at the dirt.  There was no smile on her face, and she barely acknowledged us when we greeted her.  Though she was wearing boots, the feet of her father and little sister were clearly riddled with jiggers, so I could guess that hers were, too.  I saw no fire, so it was likely that they hadn’t eaten that day.  Everything about this place made me want to grab these two little girls and take them away to where they could be properly taken care of.

We stood there for a while, Jennifer and Joseph talking to the father and each taking the girl to the side of the house to talk to her privately.  After what felt like ages, Jennifer told me that, since the mother wasn’t home right now, they couldn’t make any decisions about bringing the girls back to Tania yet.  We walked away empty-handed.

It was hard to walk away that day from those two little girls, not knowing what would become of them.  It’s hard to leave the kids at Tania at the end of the summer, when all I really want to do is keep loving these kids as if they were my own.  I could have the biggest heart in the entire world, but that doesn’t make me capable of saving everyone in the world who needs to be saved.

Thankfully, God doesn’t ask me to save everyone.  He doesn’t even ask me to save anyone.  He just asks me to love who I can, where I am, and he’ll do the saving.  And, since God is everywhere, he’ll take care of the ones I can’t.  He’ll hold those little girls in Meru until they can be held by someone who knows how to care for them.  He’ll hold my little ones at Tania until I can return and hold them again.  And he knows so much better than me how to care for them.

Meru visit

I had the incredible privilege this past weekend to visit Meru, the hometown of Jennifer and Joseph, the directors of the Tania Centre.  I had no idea, as we drove down the dusty, bumpy roads towards the base of Mount Kenya, that this trip would lead me to a much greater understanding of how God has pieced together my story.

            

Our first stop in Meru was to the house of Joseph’s 99-year-old uncle.  Though bed-ridden and blind, this man had clearly lost none of his mental capacity or wit.  He didn’t speak English, so I didn’t understand most of what he was saying, but Jennifer and Joseph hardly ever stopped laughing the whole time we were there.

Joseph told me that it was his uncle who first encouraged his mother to get her children a formal education.  Though Joseph’s father didn’t believe in educating girls, meaning none of Joseph’s older sisters ever set foot in a school, his mother did convince him to let Joseph go to school.  Joseph spent many school nights at his uncle’s house, which was closer to the school than his own.  It was clear that Joseph looked at this man with the same love he had for his own father.

When Joseph was accepted into high school, his mother went to the uncle asking for help with his school fees.  Joseph’s uncle gave his mother a 90 kg. bag of beans, which she carried, by herself, several kilometers to the market to sell.  The lengths that his family went to in order to get him to school are so humbling.

Another stop this weekend was to Joseph’s high school.  He hadn’t been to the school in 45 years, he told me, and he was excited to visit.  We stopped at a memorial to the founding head master, who had been head master when Joseph attended.  One of the nuns, Bibbian, talked to us and exchanged stories about the school with Joseph.  They also exchanged contact information to see about sending some of the boys from Tania there when they finish class 8!

We met a cousin who was there when Joseph brought Jennifer home to meet his family for the first time, when they also met a missionary couple from the U.S.  The cousin, along with the rest of the family, all approved of Jennifer, so she got to stay.

We drove past the house in Meru where Jennifer and Joseph lived next door to those missionaries, who were sent to Kenya from my own church, Fairfax Circle Church, back in the 80’s.  These couples raised their children together and became great friends.  So great, in fact, that the American man, Darrell Wise, wrote to the church to ask for assistance when Joseph was accepted to an American university for his Master’s degree, but his scholarship was not enough, and my church rose to the occasion.

It was in this same house that my roommate stayed on one of her first trips to Kenya, never knowing that, in 2014, her roommate would be seeing the same house.

As we traveled from place to place around Meru this weekend, it felt like I was reading a prequel to the story of my life.  If Joseph’s uncle had never encouraged his mother to get Joseph and education, if Joseph had never attended that secondary school, if Joseph had not met the Wise’s and become connected to my church, both Joseph’s and my lives would have turned out vastly differently.

It feels like all of these stories are one big line of dominoes—knock down the first one, and the rest come tumbling down, but if even one is missing, the rest won’t fall.  I still don’t know all of the dominoes that had to line up to get me here at the Tania Centre in 2014, but it is humbling to see all that I have seen that made it possible.  I am so thankful for a God who orchestrates our lives in ways that intersect to get us all right where we need to be.

I pray that I’ll always be where God needs me to be so that I’m not the missing domino in someone else’s life story.  Who knows what dominoes will fall because of my time at Tania in 2014?

A new name

It didn't hit me what "abandoned" meant until I was looking at the names on the wall of the special needs classroom last year.  Each student had a name card on the wall, proudly displaying their first and last names.

Except for one, which only read "Charity."

I'd been told that she'd been abandoned in the forest, but other abandoned children I'd met at least knew their parents long enough to know their last names.  Charity had been in the forest for so long that she had no recollection of human behavior, let alone her name.

I imagine there are any number of names Charity could have chosen based on how she'd been treated early in life:  Unwanted. Unloved. Disposable. Ignored. A painful past can lead to painful ideas about one's worth. Mistreated children grow into adults who believe they are ugly, they are worthless, they are unloved. Adults who don't know how great God's love is for us.

But the Tania Centre is a place where the children are loved and treated as family.  They know here that, no matter what a child's past has been, God sees that child as beautiful, valuable, and loved. And, this week, as the children were called one by one to come receive their new uniforms, Charity was called not just "Charity," but a first AND last name.  This place that is so full of love could not leave her nameless.  Charity is a part of a family now, and that family has given her a new name.

Though we may not have a story as drastic as Charity's, many of us have grown up giving ourselves names that don't reflect our true value:  Mediocre. Hopeless. Plain. Jaded. Condemned. Maybe you grew up always feeling second best, or maybe society's impossible beauty standards have made you feel impossibly unattractive. Maybe you're sick so often you're sure you'll never be well, or maybe you've been abused and have come to believe you deserved it. You've given yourself a name that reflects how you feel, but this doesn't reflect God's reality.

To God, you are more than mediocre.  You have a future filled with hope.  You are made in his image, which is anything but plain.  God can erase your condemnation, and, when he does, he'll replace all of those names.

"The nations will see your righteousness, and all kings your glory; you will be called by a new name that the mouth of the Lord will bestow.  You will be a crown of splendor in the Lord's hand, a royal diadem in the hand of your God.  No longer will they call you Deserted, or your name Desolate."  --Isaiah 62:2-4

How wonderful to have a name reflecting a family that means LOVE.

Moja Tu visit

This has been a long, exciting week here at the Tania Centre!  We received a group of volunteers from the Austin-based non-profit Moja Tu from Sunday to Thursday.  This wonderful team has been raising funds for the past year for the Tania Centre, and, this week, they bought each student a new uniform, a new pair of shoes, and a backpack with some school supplies.  I have been praying for these things for a year, and to see God answer those prayers in such a big way still overwhelms me.

 

Moja Tu has been working on finding sponsors for the students here since they launched their non-profit a year ago, and they currently have about 40 of the students sponsored.  They took pictures and gathered information this week while they were here to continue finding sponsors for the remaining students.  Keep checking their website for updates if you're interested in sponsoring any of these beautiful children!

Moja Tu also provided some fun activities to give the kids a break before our push into the end of the term.  Wednesday was a day filled with kite flying, ball throwing, jumping rope, and bouncing in a bouncy castle.  The children were beat by the end of the day, in the best way.  It warmed my heart to see their smiles.

I will continue to pray for the Moja Tu team as they finish up their visit to Kenya and travel back to Austin, and I hope God continues to bless their work here at the Tania Centre.  I can't wait to see what other good Moja Tu will do here!

"And if anyone gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones who is my disciple, truly I tell you, that person will certainly not lose their reward."  --Matthew 10:42

You are golden, child

"Auntie!" she yelled as she ran up to the woman and buried her face in her embrace to hide her tears of joy.  The sweet girl from class 6 could not have been more excited to see that someone had come to visit her. I had to turn away to hide my own tears.

Today was visiting day at the Tania Centre.  Students could have relatives or other important adults in their lives come to visit them at the school.  Many of the students don't have parents, or don't have parents who can come to visit them, so other adults had to step into that role today.  Some of the dorm mothers and other school employees took the children in small groups to spend time with them, listen to them, and give them little treats.  The children were thrilled with their party hats and masks, cookies, and cups of pineapple juice.

Some of the children, like the class 6 girl, were lucky enough to have outside visitors come to see them.  A few friends of the Tania Centre stopped in to see some of the students shortly after lunch.  One of the older girls with specials needs saw their car pull in and, unable to speak, started wildly waving her hands at the dorm mother she was with, and pointing up at the car.  She got permission, and went running up to greet everyone as they piled out of the car to greet her and her friends from the special ed class.  This particular girl doesn't always have much control of her facial muscles, but she did not stop grinning from the moment she hugged her first visitor until they left.  Oh, the joy of being loved.

The class 6 girl was so thrilled to have visitors that she couldn't keep them to herself--she invited three of her friends, and me, to join in with her visit.  We sat around a table and enjoyed together the many treats that her aunties brought--chips (french fries), stew, sausages, orange soda, and fresh, juicy oranges.  The girl was given gifts, too, like a soap dish and laundry detergent.  Her elation was so contagious that I could not stop grinning, either.

One sweet girl lost her father, who used to be a teacher here, a few weeks ago.  She seemed a little lost while everyone was visiting with people, so I decided that I would visit with her myself.  We sat there for a while, with her just leaning on my shoulder, which seemed to be what she wanted most at the moment.  Some children visiting with one of the dorm mothers noticed her by herself and brought her some juice and biscuits, and another child donated a party hat to her.  And she was one of the three friends who were invited to visit with the other girl's aunties.  It was probably a hard day for her, but she knew she was not forgotten.

In a school so large (80 students, plus another 40 high schoolers who come to live here during breaks), I'm sure it's easy for these students to feel lost in the crowd.  In the bustling cities and neat, trimmed suburbs of America, we often feel lost, too.  Everyone, from the special needs students of the Rift Valley to the stay-at-home moms of Northern Virginia, needs to know that they matter.  That they are important.  That they are loved.  That someone cares enough to come for them.

We can be reminded that, even if it seems like we don't make much of a difference with our existence, that Jesus thinks we matter a whole bunch.  He told this story about how he rejoices over each one of us the same way a shepherd rejoices over a lost sheep that has been found.  It doesn't matter that the shepherd already had 99 other sheep, and it doesn't matter to Jesus how many other people are already in a relationship with him, he will still come for you, the one lost sheep.  He will be so excited to see you that he'll have the angels throw a party in your honor!  I imagine, for some of these children, that party will include biscuits, juice, and shiny party hats.

"Five sparrows are sold for just two pennies, but God doesn't forget a one of them.  Even the hairs on your head are counted.  So don't be afraid!  You are worth more than many sparrows."  -Luke 12:6-7