I am still alive!

Yesterday morning we sent off our first team for safari and I cannot believe how fast time has gone. The past 12 days have been so amazing.

After the team left I was sitting in my hammock outside the guest house (and let me tell you, you have not hammocked until you have hammocked with monkey’s climbing the limbs above you) and I was just thinking about everything we got to see and experience as well as touch and taste since being here. This team was so gracious to us as we worked out everything as a Core Team. We’ve made mistakes for sure but we are learning quickly and feel like we should be proud of ourselves thus far. The Lord has definitely been our guide, strength and wisdom the whole way. The experiences we had transcend cool experiences, good memories and fun times making new friends. I have found that when you are doing Kingdom work, there really are not the right words to express this because words feel too small when trying to capture a God that has worked in and through every moment. But I’ll give it a shot. So we are bringing in short term teams from the US of mostly collage age students. While here we are staying at the Moffat Bible College guest house in Kijabe. We are high altitude so sometimes it takes a minute to catch your breath but the mountain views are stunning. The baboons are not as terrifying as I thought they would be, and unlike popular belief they will not attack you. Also I have only seen one hyena, and it was dead on the side of the road. One of the most cultural experiences we have had thus far is going to Maasi church which is far out in the valley. The Maasi are very traditional tribe that live in Kenya- the ones you see when you google image Kenya, with the bright jewelry and big ear lobes. Well when we took our team out this past time, before church we had a goat slaughtering. It was quite the experience! Church was great even though I did not understand most of it. To worship the same God in different languages is something I have found so beautiful. And then, after church we had lunch, and yep- you guessed it…goat. The weather has been beautiful and warm the past couple days and the sun has been doing some work on our skin. We are taking the teams to different ministries in the area to see what is going on over here and see some of the needs.

One day I sat with a Kenyan that asked me why I like Kenya. Of course I talked about how beautiful the land is, how nice and welcoming the people are and how good the food is. But I proceeded to tell him that in America, many people including myself seem to put God in a box, however in Kenya God has no limits. He is in every situation- the good and the bad and they do not limit what He can do. My faith can be so dependent on my circumstances yet here I am convicted to see God in and through all. I started this blog talking about taking me to the valley. This was before I had seen the valley for myself. And I will tell you that at that time I had no idea how beautiful the valley view was. But I will also tell you that at that time I had no idea how broken that valley was. The other day we were finishing up at a ministry sight that was particularly humbling and I played and loved this little girl but as I walked away to the van my heart was so gripped. The people of Kenya have pieces of my heart as I come alongside to hear their stories and see glimpses into their lives. It challenges me in the big questions, like how is this fair. It leads me to conviction in how I take so much for granted and how I limit my God. I feel so small with the reality that I can physically do very little to help these people. I have to surrender my time and myself to God to multiply those minutes and those interactions with those people and that during my time with them they would not see me but Christ through me. Not that Jesus is a white man but that his spirit lives in us and it has the ability to live in them with the same accord.

We focus a lot more on relationships then check lists and it has been cool to see the Lord guiding us daily through his agenda, not ours. As we have some relationships built we will start some projects so we can have some physical impact, but we are reminding ourselves to be careful not to skip relationships. I think it’ll be easier if I just break it up into telling you about different people I’ve met along the way, ministries we partner with or places we’ve been. I’m sure more stories will come out in time. I’m breaking them up into new blog posts so that this one is not really long and then I can just continue to add.