15 Years of MITS

Well, it's over. We worked for weeks and weeks to prepare the property, a program and our hearts for the Made in the Streets 15 Year Anniversary Celebration. And it came off so well. We had some local preachers with us, some officials from the ministries of agriculture, and gender and children, lots of former students, a guest of honor who was herself honored to be here, some former team members and various friends of the ministry -- some from local schools and from Good News Productions.

We sang and prayed and ate and heard very short speeches and recited Scripture and poetry and cut the cake and talked, all the things people do at a ceremonial function. But it was more than ceremony - it was joy and glad greetings and inspiration and encouragement and a chance to show what students have done and can do.

We can get by for quite a few days on this happiness.

Fascinating Sunday with Friends

Truly a fascinating day! One of the great things about missionary life is that we get lots of visitors - and ones who love us. Worship at the Kamulu Church was true harmony! Several of our street kids were involved in leading worship. Francis Mbuvi had really studied about the UNITY of the body of Christ and wanted so much to communicate well what it means to have the DNA of Christ in us. He wanted us to get it, he wanted to share something good and precious. And one of our students, Francis Cugia, led the Lord's Supper and the collection, and he also spoke about unity - of the whole Christian movement in the world - and he reminded us of the need to give, to share. He meddled in our lives; he said, "even you students, you get some money and you go to the store and buy an avocado, and as soon as you get back to the boys' or girls' compound you say, "Don't ask." And don't we come to church, he said, after we have earned money during the week, and we say to God, "Don't ask."

Then we had 10 for lunch. Since we were almost out of food, Darlene made a great stew and homemade biscuits and we had some chips and salsa. And everybody wanted iced tea!

The retired dentist is an old friend who has helped us a lot at Made in the Streets. With him were three business and medical people working in a clinic on the Kenyan coast. One woman visitor has spent years in South Africa. Another one said, "Oh, if only our anesthesiologist could have been here; he would love the singing. They came over to be with us for a day and a night. And a young couple who live in the Sudan now and are learning Arabic and planning to help people there with agriculture - and the love of God - showed up to be with the church also. And one of our MITS Board members who is a teacher is here with her daughter. We had happy conversations, though some of it was about "the worst food I have ever eaten anywhere."

It is so great to have friends. Get one today.

Life with Young Moms

What an interesting day. I spoke in chapel at Made in the Streets today about the very beginning of the street ministry, about the first street youth that we met in 1992 and how that meeting changed our lives and led to there being Made in the Streets.

Then I spent most of the day working on the new home for the moms and babies from the streets who are now at Kamulu. There are 7 of them and they have 8 children together. We are moving them into a house next to the girls' compound, and later we will build a wall enclosing them into the compound.

In the afternoon Darlene and I met with the 7 girls, our girls' supervisor and the woman who will supervise the moms and live in the house with them. We talked about what we expect from them and how much we love them and their children. Expectations like respecting one another's space and taking good care of their own kids and not hitting the children, just as we do not hit the moms, for any reason.

After the meeting I went back to the house. Two of the young moms came over, excited to see the house, and helped me with the beds and with cleaning the floor and picking out which pillow and sheets go on which mattress. After a while I was concerned about whether they were supposed to be doing something else at the school. So I asked them, "If you were not here, where would you be?" Mercy looked at me and said, "Oh, I would be in a terrible place, just terrible, I might be dead!" She is truly happy to be at Made in the Streets. That was a little more than I wanted to know, but I thanked her for that and asked, "Well, if you were not in his house at this moment, where would you be?" They said it was teatime, and the others were drinking tea but they wanted to help with the house.

As they were finishing cleaning and working on the windowsills, Veronica noticed something and called Mercy's attention to it. Then Mercy showed me where hornets had built a very long nest along the edge of a window. I went home and then set out on a "wild at heart" adventure. You have to be careful with hornets, for they are fast and have a bad temper. And they were scattered all along the window, not bunched up to make it easy to battle them. With my "Doom" in hand, I carefully took aim and hosed them good. And this time I won!

Now the moms and babies have a new clothesline, the walls puttied and painted, all the beds put together with mattresses, pillow and sheets on them, all the lights working, along with the toilet and shower -- a good day's work. I'm tired, but the girls will rejoice when they move in tomorrow. Before I left, I noticed that Mercy had put her scarf under one of the pillows and Veronica put an exercise book under another one. Staking out a claim...

Tonight our feral cat who sneaked into our house and had 4 kittens in the bottom of a wedding dress actually came up to me and took bits of cheese out of my hand. Then she had the nerve to try to get up on the table and get at my hamburger, but I won that one too. One of the kittens is living with Francis and Maureen now, and another will go to Jackton and Milly's house soon. Two to go, then we can lock her out! Well, maybe not, cats have a way of getting in the heart.

May your heart be captured by something good today.

In the Place Christ Chose

My life has changed a great deal since we began working with street children, going into the alleyways of Eastleigh and the warren of small houses down in Mathare Valley. Spending time helping young men and women who have a heart for ministry learn how to do it with eagerness, with endurance, with joy and with confidence in the face of great difficulty.

In earlier times I was a preacher, and I loved preaching. I also taught religion and philosophy in university, and that was great joy. Then I was administrator of a technical (computer and electronics) training school, and that felt like real service, doing something genuinely good.

I have been very comfortable with all my work. We fit in well in California, both with the church and universities. Life has been blessed and full of joy.

We are having a special study lately in Sunday morning class about the human body and the body of Christ. I have downloaded pictures from the internet of human cells -- red and white blood cells, bone cells, eye cone cells, fat cells and nerve cells -- all those wondrous things in the body that show how fearfully and wonderfully we are made. Today's class was on "specializaton," making the point that a cell must "sacrifice" anything else it might have been for the sake of the body. It specializes, for the good of the body.

My life has changed as I have gotten closer to the heart of Christ, as I have found the "special" role that is mine. So now I don't preach any more, now I don't teach in the university, now I don't manage a school. And I'm no longer in California. So I am living in a less comfortable place, and my role is different. Now I am a fundraiser, and a networking liaison and an advisor, none of which make me most comfortable. But I am in the place where Jesus has placed me. It is not what is "natural" to me, but it is what naturally happens in the body of Christ.

And for this I give God glory and honor and praise, for the choice he made for me is that which makes the heart happy and fulfills the longings of the soul.

Passover and Hametz

For many years we have used a Seder service in our family and church life. Darlene did a careful study of Passover and the relationship of Jesus to the seder and to the concept of Passover. After we began the street ministry in Nairobi, we have continued to do a "Christian Seder" with the street kids in our lives. One of the fun things we do is put some packages of "bread with yeast" around the room where we do the Seder, then we have the kids hunt them down and throw them outside. There are many other parts of the Seder that are great fun as well as filled with meaning.

We remember Jewish friends in California who also had to prepare well for Passover. Some of them had large amounts of liquor in the house. Before Passover, they would gather all of it up and take it to the house of a friend who is a Gentile, because it is "hametz" (fermented, thus unclean). They would leave it there until the Seder service was over, then the next day collect it and bring it home. This meets the requirements of the letter of the law, for it is out of the house, unavailable.

I've been thinking about how being in Christ and following the way of Christ has made "hametz" a daily reality for us. In Christ we have a new and different life. Passover is every day. Every day we have to wake up and clean out all the unclean things in life, in the house, in the physical body, in the body of Christ. Our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit, and Christ is the Passover every day. The unclean is not only certain foods (and actually Christ has pronounced foods to be clean), but the unclean is in the heart, as Jesus makes clear in Matthew 15. So every day clean out jealousy, impure thoughts, hatred and anger, desiring what is another's and so on, all that which the Gospel teaches us is not for us on a Passover, especially when we sit down to eat a meal with Jesus present in the middle of the family.

Kittens, Kittens

Here is Darlene with our 4 baby kittens. Last week we found a cat, sort of feral, in our house. It had come in the window; we chased it away. The next day Darlene and Laurent baked cakes for Kennedy's wedding on Saturday. Darlene did the wedding cake and Laurent several sheet cakes. Darlene put all of the cakes on our tables overnight, planning to decorate them on Friday. Friday morning 2 of the cakes had a bit eaten out of them, so we blamed the cat. We locked up all the windows (makes it kind of stuffy in the house, but...), and they decorated cakes on Friday.

That night the cat jumped on the window ledge and banged her head on the glass, three times. I went over and looked down at her and said "no." She finally went away.

Saturday morning Grace came to put on her wedding dress for the wedding; we have 4 hanging in the closet. Then we all went to the wedding, and it was great. We love it when our street kids grow up and get jobs and find the love of their lives. About 250 people came, enjoyed, ate a meal, tasted cake, and we finished in time for them to leave for the honeymoon (no easy feat in Kenya). Grace and Kennedy came to the house for her to change out of the wedding dress. As Darlene was helping her, she heard a cry, and thought a bird had gotten into the house somehow. When she pulled the wedding dresses out, 4 little kittens tumbled out.

So...tender-hearted Darlene opened up the windows in the bedroom, put meat and milk on the floor, and closed the door. The babies cried and finally momma came back. So now we have residents in our house.

We are glad that three team members at MITS have offered to take a kitten -- so that leaves one for us. And what of the Momma? Well, that's up to her. We never make anyone stay here; the street kids are free to leave if they don't like MITS. The rule is that they can't come back if they choose to leave after living here. Of course Momma cat knows how to get in. It's a good thing that our practice is never to leave any foodstuff out (the wedding cakes were a necessary exception). Anybody want a kitten?

Planning for a Volcano

We have been developing another "business" course for our students who are in skills training at Made in the Streets - this one is about PLANNING. Bill Rider of Mt. Vernon, Iowa, created the basic materials, and Darlene has tailored it for our current students. Part of planning is seeing the potential obstacles and possible pitfalls of our plan of action.

Darlene and I always try to plan ahead when we travel. But we didn't plan for Iceland's volcano, even though we had read that is would erupt someday. So we flew through London and stopped off for a couple of days in Athens -- which turned into several more days, as we couldn't go back through London. Our favorite travel agent, David Jack from the Conejo Valley Church in Thousand Oaks, CA, finally got us seats on a Turkish Airline flight through Istanbul to Nairobi.

If you have to be stuck somewhere because of a volcano, Athens is a mighty good place. We watched the sun set from the Areopagus, where Paul preached to Greeks about the unknown God who is known in Christ (Acts 17). The picture is of the Areopagus taken from the Acropolis with the Parthenon in the background. Note the new stairway they put in to make it easy on older people!! The old stairs are still there, down below, and still a bit slippery, but that is probably the way Paul got up there, so we went ahead and climbed up that way. We ate gyros and feta cheese and spinach pie (and Darlene ate baklava). Dino Roussos graciously invited us on a bus trip with Christians from Tennessee to Corinth and Mycenae (remember Agamemnon and the Lions' Gate with the oldest sculptures in Greece??). It was a sentimental trip to Corinth, because we remember well one of the last trips we made with Darlene's Mom, who would come to Kenya and teach street kids to read for 6 months a year during her 70s. She loved Crete and Nikos Kazantzakis, whose tombstone reads, "I desire nothing, I fear nothing, I am free." She also loved Corinth, and she put a foot on every paving stone of the ancient city so that she would step where the apostle Paul did. So Darlene and I went down the street that way this time too. Now Darlene's Mom cannot go in the flesh to any place, but in the spirit she can still walk the walk with the Lord, and some day she may again step where Paul has stepped before her.