Day 3: Monday January 27th, 2014

While Jiteck and Peter went out to prepare the dehydrators, the rest of us had a devotional time together and prayed for one another as well as the church. While we were talking, Byung expressed concern about people he had seen the night before. He remembered several of them and he remembered praying for them the year before. He said they had been healed at the time, but now their pain had returned and they were requesting help for the same difficulties they had before. He felt as though somehow he didn't do a good job last year, that he wasn't good enough to do God's work. Why else would the pain have come back? We talked about this in detail because it's a fact that sometimes God chooses ~not to heal people. Sometimes the pain is immediately relieved but later returns. This very difficulty is what I had faced the night before with the lady at Musengo and I felt blessed to know why healing doesn't always come in the way we expect. To encourage Byung, we discussed the many possible reasons why God doesn't always heal, remembering Peter's devotional words about the necessity of miracles being in God's Will, God's Way, and God's Time. Life is such an ongoing experience. Just like the ways in which we must regularly work to maintain our lifestyles (sleeping, eating, washing, etc.), we must also work similarly in the Spirit. Perhaps our difficulties, whether emotional or physical, need to be continually brought to God for "maintenance." Sharing our difficulties (as well as our blessings) with God should be a way of life, not just the work of a fleeting moment. Where's the relationship in that? That's like going to the baker's to buy a cake instead of spending time with the baker to learn how to make the cake together. Byung was encouraged and I was grateful to be the one to encourage him. We then shared prayer requests and prayed over each other. Marcus then mentioned that we should pray for the church back home, any members that needed prayer. Just as we began mentioning people who needed prayer, Peter and Jiteck returned with most of the materials they needed for the mango dehydrators and he later expressed how encouraged his heart was to find us praying for his church. It lifted his spirits greatly and we were glad to have done it. After we prayed for many people back home in Korea, the team got to work constructing different parts of the dehydrators while I wrote some of the posts for the blog. Time-consuming, this! After they finished all they could do, we then ate a quick lunch of ramyeon (we packed it from home) before hurrying out to visit one of the top performing schools in the area. The school, Syomutwa Bethel Academy, was founded in 2007 and, despite having few materials (the classrooms are bare with only a few desks and a blackboard attached to the brick walls), the school has done very, very well on the national exams and the director has been able to build a boarding house for a few girls that need to stay closer to the school. For about $15,000 USD, they built the house with an adjacent shower room. The building is well-built from concrete, with large concrete dividers running down either side to make separate spaces for up to four girls to sleep in bunk beds. The boarding-house head mistress sleeps in the room by the door. Her name is Penny and she had been a teacher at a nearby secondary school for 7 years but the director of Bethel Academy asked her to come and help manage the boarding house and she is so happy to be working with the girls. Her room is simple and she could do with a bookshelf or closet to store her things, but she has one overhead light and a radio, lots of books, and she's glad to have the space in such a nice new building. She's currently looking after 10 girls, but is excited to look after more as soon as the school can afford to buy more bunk bends, mattresses, and supplies to house the students. Housing costs for one girl are about $600 per year, including their uniforms, books, and meals, and Peter is hoping we can do something like this for the girls in Kibera. He would like to bring them out from Nairobi to a peaceful place where they can complete their education all the way through secondary school with opportunities for going on to college or, perhaps even Bible school. The Bible School. For so much of the rest of the day, I had no words for what I was about to see and anything I did say seemed trivial. I had not anticipated where we were to go next, but it's a place for which I will always be so, so grateful we did. From the school, after gathering most of the kids together for a spontaneous picture, we drove further up into the Kenyan countryside, up into a more mountainous region that we hadn't been able to see before from our current days spent in Tulia. This part of the world, the way leading up to the small town of Mutulu and the highest point in the area, is beautiful. Beyond beautiful really. As we drove up the hill, and then especially after we got out and starting hiking up the mountain on foot, it was like the entire world was laid out on all sides below us. Rolling hills with tiny brick houses scattered about, stitched between ribbons of dirt roads that have been etched across the hills. Small towns clustered together among a rippling ocean of farms, green with the abundance of the recent rains. Even though I had once lived on the continent and even traveled across its southern point, I never knew Africa was this beautiful. Twelve years before, Peter had spent 5 months serving there as a missionary in the area alongside Mbondo who had come up at the same time. He came to love the place, and as I was about to see, it isn't hard to do. One day, while walking with Mbondo at the top of the mountain, Peter had a vision of a Bible School being built there, right there at the top: a place of study and worship and peace for Bible scholars preparing to take God's love to the world. While he lived in Kenya, he came to realize how difficult it was for pastors working in the countryside. There simply isn't enough money in each community to support a pastor full-time, so most pastors must work in several towns. Another difficulty is simply raising up missionaries to become pastors as the money is so rarely there for even the most ambitious and skilled students to go to secondary school, let alone seminary. His initial vision was to serve the local Kenyans, providing that secondary school, a Bible school, and a theological library to raise up Kenyan pastors for the area, but soon his vision grew into something even more and, over the last twelve years, through many discussions with Mbondo, Alexander, & James, the dream now includes a boarding school to provide a loving home and a rich education for the girls in Kibera, a university that will allow missionaries to also get degrees in other fields that they might go out to the world and minister through their work as business-owners, lawyers, and agricultural specialists, etc. And this university will be attended by students from across the world, not just from within Kenya. Students from nations across Africa, the United States, Korea, and every other country in the world in which hearts are being called to bring God's love to the world and make disciples of all nations. There will be guesthouses and a conference hall to host seminary retreats for pastors from across the world. This will be a place of where the heart of God can delight in those seeking to serve Him and, as I was looking out over all that we surveyed, I just knew that God's Spirit must roam these hills when He's in need of rest. It's so beautiful--so lovingly designed by God--I can't imagine why He wouldn't Together, we prayed over Peter's vision… that God would bring it to pass, that He would soften the hearts of the current owners of the land to be willing to sell their parcels, that we might start building something soon, and that the right people would be brought together to make this vision a reality. We also prayed for our mango project, that it might succeed and bring in the necessary funds to support the boarding schools and the construction of the seminary campus. As the sun was going down over our prayers, I was in awe that such a great dream could ever come true… simply because it's such a great dream. It's so simple and yet so beautiful. Could we really be so privileged to become part of such a legacy on this earth? I know that, in order to see it come about, all who are involved must have their hearts and ears fully inclined toward God. We can't have more than one Master in the building of this project. With God and for this project, it's all or nothing… But how awesome it would be to receive such a gift! To see this seed of a vision grow into an abundant harvest! And all we have to do to succeed is obey the Lord, giving our all to Christ. We then walked down the mountain, watching the sun set over the hills. Earlier, Mbondo had explained that, if there weren't any clouds in the distance, we'd be able to see Mt. Kilimanjaro to the south and Mt. Kenya to the west. "Really??" I asked. To think that this vision would truly be like a city on a hill, shining God's glory out and over all the land, to the very edges of Kenya! The thought that kept running through my mind as we made our way down the steep road was how much this place felt like Heaven on Earth. God's Kingdom will reign here. We then returned to the church and started to set up for that evening's worship and prayer service. We were testing the instruments and warming up our voices when, before we knew it, our rehearsal turned into the spontaneous opening set because the townspeople just started piling in while we practiced. So many people came. Timid and shy, they crowded together like sardines at the back, almost afraid to come forward but we asked them to pile in to the front of the rows of chairs, even sitting in the middle of the wide aisle. After Peter spoke, imparting that no follower of Christ can serve two masters, that they must be wholly devoted to Jesus only and that they cannot hold the hand of a demon at the same time, we asked for anyone who needed prayers of salvation and healing. So many people came forward that night. I prayed for a woman named Anna. She had a lump on her back, her chest was heavy, her blood pressure always rose steeply and woke her in the middle of the night, and she suffered headaches. I prayed for her for a while. I prayed that she would be relieved of her headaches and soon, she said it was free of pain! I prayed too for her blood pressure—that it wouldn’t wake her early in the morning—and I would ask her the next day it woke her up later that night. It took a while, but I also felt the swelling of the lump go down significantly. At first, it had the height of a hardboiled egg in my hand, but after we finished praying, it was about the size of a slice of mango. It didn't disappear completely, but Anna insisted that I pray for others. She was resigned to the fact that she would likely need an operation, but of course there is no money for such a surgery, so before I let her go, we prayed that she would be able to receive either complete healing at the hands of God or the funds for the surgery. Her spirit was so incredibly light throughout it all. She never once ceased praising the Lord. The lump might still be there, but she realized that it perhaps was her burden, her thorn to carry to like Paul's. Every time she thinks of it, she is reminded of the value of her devotion to God on this earth, how important it is that she remain faithful in spite of hardship… and that her place in His kingdom will not be hampered by an earthly body. I then went on to pray for a girl who couldn't hear and Anna's daughter who was suffering headaches. Both of them were healed. Anna's daughter is an angelic little creature. She's actually 18 years old, but she lives in the body of a twelve year old, and has the mind of a toddler. Her eyes are crossed and her mouth hangs open as she looks out in observation of the world around her, but her smile is ready and willing to appear whenever there is something to be glad about. I think, when God looks at children like Anna's daughter, children who experience few feelings of pride or malice, He takes delight in their purity. They aren't devious or calculating… they simply live and, like Him, shun injustice and take delight in goodness. Two women with chest problems, another lady with back aches, one who suffered a kind of heartburn (we prayed twice for her), Anna’s daughter had a headache, another girl had difficulty hearing. One lady has difficulty walking. A young girl, who was a good dancer, had stomach and chest pain and often suffers fainting spells. A mother came forward with her son and explained that he was too scared to go to school by himself. So many others came forward to receive prayer for both physical problems and personal needs. It was a truly blessed time in the presence of God. Until tomorrow, I pray you all are blessed of God. We are so blessed to be here! Ellie