Memories

Sorry it has been a while since I've written anything here. Lots happens to me, and I have a lot of thoughts and ideas, but I'm not so good about sharing them on the blog.

My heart and mind are on my mom-by-marriage this Christmas time, since she reached 90 in November, started losing weight that month and died on Christmas Eve. I feel sorrow together with Darlene, great relief that my prayer that she might go Home is answered, and really good about the life and relationship we have had.

In-law relations should and can be filled with joy and with building one another up. After all, the spouse of one's child has been CHOSEN, loved, wanted. One's own child, who is smart and beautiful and good and wise, has chosen him or her. Let's be glad for in-laws everywhere, and let us praise God for them. GO, IN-LAWS!

We share rich memories with Dorothy Wright - making a life together with Darlene and her parents helping in so many ways when we were young, working together with street kids in Nairobi as we began to teach kids Bible and English and Math, taking trips together as we went back and forth from US to Kenya. We rode the elephant in Northeast India, we walked all around the old wall of Jerusalem, we stood at Nikos Kazantkasis' burial plot in Heraklion on Crete, we saw the sights of old Athens and picked up pieces of marble, we looked for gold on the riverbanks of California, we listened to the waltz music by the Danube on our Vienna trip, and we thoroughly enjoyed seeing the animals on the Mara in Kenya. We also sat knee to knee with street kids who were scratching the body lice, and we went out together to visit street kids where they slept at the "bases" in the alleyways of Eastleigh. And not once did my mom-by-marriage complain or back off from any unpleasant task.

We've been looking at old pictures on Christmas eve and Christmas day and today, and the memories are sweet as a Swiss chocolate bar, as gentle as the hands of Jesus, as uplifting as the church singing "Here I am to Worship".

So...give thanks for your in-laws today, give them a hug and ask God to give them richly everything they need. They make your life better.

Inafaa, Haifai

"It works; it doesn't work."

I am sitting at the Java House in Nairobi, where they have wi-fi!! When I am home, Quickbooks won't work on my laptop. It decides that it wants to register AGAIN, and apparently it doesn't like my internet connection at home, because it gives me a phone number in the USA instead of registering again. But when I am sitting here at Java, it works! And it doesn't say anything about registering. And apparently the Quickbooks support people don't know what to do about that, because they do not respond to my emails (except to write me asking me to contact them and say I am satisfied with the service!!!). Also, when I call them from Nairobi, they apparently don't like my sometimes bad phone connection, because they give up quick and tell me they have to go. Oh, well. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. (Did I mention that my Quickbooks program on the other laptop refused to register online, and they didn't give me a code to use when I called, so in a few days QB will quit on me. It's a little hard to get that code one needs to keep QB running.) I'm saying all this so that those to whom I have to report financial information will please forgive me for being late.

On the other hand, I can't get my Go Daddy email to come up when I am at Java House, but at home on my slow connection with the cell phone company it comes up and works. So "it works' it doesn't work"

Life is full of little twists that can raise stress levels and irritate us. I've been working on staying conscious of the Biblical command to "Rejoice in the Lord always." If we are willing to obey all that is written in Scripture, then this is our daily job - to rejoice! And of course we have much to rejoice about - forgiven sin, the Spirit within, fellowshipping with friends.

The Lord has set up life very well. Whether it works or doesn't, rejoice!

Proud of Mauryn

Sorry I haven't written for a long time; I'm sure you really miss it and will hang on every word. I do appreciate anyone who reads what I write. This is a picture of Tim and Susie Neel from Midland, Texas (the Golf Course Road Church) along with our own George Mwenda, formerly from the streets. He has been with us for 2 1/2 years now and is studying computers in the skills training program. He is wearing a shirt they brought with them. The Golf Course Road Church sponsors a major World Bible School program in Kenya that is managed by our own Mauryn Mbuvi.

Mauryn is married to Francis Mbuvi, who is the administrator at Made in the Streets. They have two children, Jonathan and Jeremy.

We met Mauryn soon after our arrival in Kenya in 1992. Berkeley Hackett introduced us to her and let us know that she had no way to pay for school fees. She was in the 9th grade at the time. We paid her school fees at the boarding school in Western Kenya, and she became a member of the teenage teaching team we developed to go out to village churches and teach children on weekends. In 1993 we made 25 trips to various places in the country, and our teenagers became excellent teachers. We met Francis on the streets in 1994, and he soon became one of the teachers as well.

After Mauryn completed high school, we asked her what she wanted to do. Since I was director of the computer college (KCITI), she chose to study computers at home in Eastleigh. She completed that program in two years, and we once again asked what she wanted. By that time she wanted to work in the hotel industry; we helped her enrol in Utalii College in Nairobi which teaches catering, cooking and hotel management. After completing that, she got an internship in a hotel near Mombasa on the Kenyan coast. But after about two months there was severe ethnic fighting in the Mombasa area, many people were killed, and the tourists stopped coming. Many hotels closed for the season, and Mauryn was forced to return to Nairobi.

By that time I was involved with the World Bible School program, led by John DeFore, a member at Golf Course Road. GCR was also our sponsor for the three years 1998 to 2000. So I asked Mauryn to be my secretary and handle the WBS records and letters. She took over my office in our building behind KCITI. The street ministry was growing fast; Darlene and I were working with 9 young men and 2 young women. All the young men treated Mauryn like a sister, until one day in a Team meeting Darlene said to them, "Have any of you noticed Mauryn?" They all laughed, but a few days later we noticed some of them begin to stop in at the office, talking to Mauryn. In 1998, Darlene and I moved to an apartment down the street from KCITI, and we rented an extra apartment for the WBS office and for visitors to stay in. Again, we noticed that now and then young men would stop by and visit with Mauryn a few minutes. But it was Francis who made her laugh, and who brought flowers. We moved into our own building nearby in August, 1999.

It was not long until Mauryn was handling the relationship with Golf Course Road and developing the WBS ministry further and further. To shorten the story, she now manages more than 20 men who gather names for WBS and who work in churches around the country. And even greater, some of those men had great compassion for homeless children in the countryside, many of whose parents died from HIV infection. Golf Course Road has responded with compassion and support, and Mauryn and her team now operate several orphanages in various parts of the country. It is a great ministry that has marvelous potential. As I write this, Mauryn is on a trip to visit orphanages in Western Kenya with Tim and Susie. Last night, we had Francis over for dinner.

This family lives in our hearts.

Visiting Granny

Generation to generation our values are shaped. And the great-grandparents and the great-grandchildren must actually see one another for those values to be indelibly stamped on our hearts and minds and spirits. So we take the granddaughters over to see "Granny" as much as possible.

Dorothy Wright had mutual love and respect and fun with her husband. After she was alone, she traveled to Nairobi, Kenya, each year for 6 months to teach English reading and conversation to preachers, young people and street kids. She had such fun doing this valuable ministry. And one of the neatest things is that Darlene and her Mom did ministry together, sharing the joys and pains of the lives and needs of street kids.

Now she sits quiet, no wrinkles on her face, sleeping most of the time, not speaking and seldom opening her eyes, and she will be 90 years old soon. But she still makes noises in her throat when a great-granddaughter says "I love you, Granny."

She also has a malignancy growing on her face. So Darlene sat with her for the whole process of surgery for it. Not to remove it completely, but to limit its growth and remove the sight of it. She slept through the surgery and it is healing great.

Generation to generation we love one another, and we keep the values alive - love and fun in life and service in Christ's name and devotion to one another. Blessed be the Lord who gives us this life, and even better is coming.

Creation and Necessity

I am so amazed at all the marvelous discoveries about the universe and all the thought that goes into where all this came from and what we can know from looking at the universe. Recently astronomers have found two planets circling a star. And there is a star out there that has an enormous amount of water around it. And scientists are thinking about it carefully. Already they say the water can't come from passing asteriods and comets and other celestial sources. The water is too close in to the star -- so the star itself is producing the water. But from what astronomers already know, the star should be producing carbon monoxide. Yet water is forming. It's exciting to think about what that might mean and what new discoveries will come because the formation of huge amounts of water is possible in a star.

Stephen Hawking is one of those thinkers who seeks to understand the universe and history and form theories about the source and the destiny of life. He thinks about gravitation and relativity and all those obscure things most of us know so little about. And Hawking has recently written that what we know about science does not bring about a necessity that God is involved in creation! He concludes that the more we know about the universe, the less necessary it is that we must argue from the creation to the Creator.

What a marvelous idea! What freedom to our faith! And it fits the theology of Scripture. We do not believe in God because the universe demands it. We do not believe in God because of some evidence built into the structure of the universe or the atom or gravity. We do not believe in God because reasoning about the nature of life leads us to that conclusion.

We believe in God because he has come to us, because he has made himself known to us, because Jesus Christ has described the Father who made all things. As John wrote, "what we have seen, what we have touched.." The mystery of our faith is this, that Christ lives in us. At the core of our faith is not knowledge about the physical universe, but knowledge about God himself.

Once you know God in Christ, then you can see where the farthest star and the most amazing phenomena fit into his reality. As Paul writes in Romans 1, the glory and majesty is seen in all the things that are. We might even want to talk about intelligent design. But we do not start there. We do not argue from design to the designer. We know him, for he knows us, and he came to set our hearts on fire.

Christ is in us. And this truth sets us free.

Vacation (Paris Style) Joy

John Wambu, with whom I work closely at Made in the Streets both in our building projects and relations to government offices, often says, "We can't take a vacation; we have work to do." He hardly ever takes a day off, and I almost never take a day off when we are in Nairobi. Street ministry and the boarding program are a 24/7 deal.

But vacations are really nice, as we found out again when we stopped off in Paris on our way back to the USA. Paul and Edie Tews hosted us with great kindness. Here is a picture of us in the Tuileries Gardens having lunch on Sunday afternoon. Delightful!

It was great attending French worship with them on Sunday morning -- what a cosmopolitan church, with many members from West and North Africa, both immigrants and second generation. And such noisy and happy fellowship before and after the worship time. And in the evening, after English worship, they had a fellowship meal. We were happy to get in on that, as the preacher is a good cook. Here is a picture of us with Roland and Rosa at the church building.

I Get to Preach

I am always happy when I get to preach. Most of my adult life has been involved in preaching. 1968 in Roswell, NM, then a two year break to teach in a University, then 21 years preaching in Redwood City, CA. For several years in Kenya, I would go to various congregations and be asked to preach. Since we have been doing street ministry, I have encouraged the young people we work with to preach and teach, and I have done less and less. Last week I was in Eastleigh at the new congregation we have opened at the Eastleigh Center, and I was asked to preach. It was the third meeting of the congregation, there were 70 people, and 5 young men from the streets were baptized. That was a good day!

These days Francis Mbuvi invites me to preach at Kamulu on the Sunday before Darlene and I leave for the USA, so that means I get to preach two times a year. TODAY was that day. My sermon was on the subject "Fearfully and Wonderfully Made," and my illustration today was BONES and the human skeleton. I had an 18 inch model of a human body and a handful of the 206 bones in the body. I also had 99 candles and 99 matchboxes.

Since what bones do for the human body is give us FREEDOM - we can move about, raise our hands, nod our heads -- freedom of movement, freedom to do what we were made for. And the equivalent of bones in the "body of Christ" are the teachings that never change, that form the hardness of the body of Christ. I spoke of teachings such as that of sexual purity and "love one another" and "receive the Holy Spirit" -- great things that make the church what it is.

I also talked about the MISSION STATEMENT of the Kamulu Church. Some of the leadership has been meeting to talk about our future and the purposes of the congregation, and so today we started asking the whole church to agree on our mission statement. Essentially it is "we are free to be friends," a message we want to spread all over the community (free from greed, free from hate, free from fear). And the second part is "we love children." The third part is "we want everyone to know Jesus." Today's emphasis was "free to be friends."

I said that in Kenya everyone needs a candle and a matchbox, because the electricity may be out tonight. Everyone nodded. And we had put a label on each matchbox that says,

Free to be Friends

The Kamulu Church

Christians Meet Here

Call 0733 834507

We have 3 groups that often meet after church on Sunday. So I asked each group -- the youth group, the young adult group, and the women's group -- to take 33 candles and matchboxes each, to visit 33 homes in Kamulu, and to explain to each that we want everyone here to be "free to be friends" and to tell them why.

Should be exciting to see what happens!