Humbled

Wow, 2 days here in Kenya feels like a LIFETIME! I can tell that at this pace, there will not be much time for blog entries, so I am going to combine a few things into one. Here goes!

Our travel here went very well. We seem to have found favor in all the right places – thank you to those who prayed! We were, for some mysterious reason, called up to talk the manager at Emirates Air in Seattle, who then gave us new seat assignments for this FIFTEEN HOUR FLIGHT – we were put in business class! The seats recline to almost completely flat, so we got some good sleep, and we were treated like royalty! We just kept saying, THANK YOU LORD!!! We then spent the night in Dubai, paid for by the airlines, and woke up early enough to tour Dubai for 2 hours before catching the final leg of our flight to Nairobi.

The moment of truth would come when we tried to go through customs in Nairobi with our hundreds of MP3 players for the Roman’s Project Pastor’s Conferences. If you read Rick’s email, he had quite the time getting thrm through customs in Ethiopia. But they didn’t even look in our bags or ask us to stop in Nairobi, just waved us on through! Another THANK YOU LORD!!! And The SIM people were there waiting for Chuck and Liz, so off they went, while Lynne caught one more flight to Eldoret. The rest of this entry is about Lynne’s time in Webuye with her daughter Andrea and son-in-law Jonathan.

After spending the night in Eldoret, we rose early the next morning and drove straight to their church in Webuye, King Jesus Faith Ministry. What a wonderful time of worship! Then they introduced and honored the guests there, making quite the fuss over the mama (that would be me. Of course, I did have to get over his comment “we are so thankful that you have come such a long distance at your age” – I must have been looking particularly travel weary! ). I had been put in the front row with the pastor’s wife to begin with, and then as the service progressed, it suddenly seemed that I had been asked to preach that morning!!!! OH MY! I’m so thankful that Jonathan saw it coming and stepped forward to rescue me, brought me on stage to say a few words and then HE preached in my place! What a blessing to get to hear my son-in-law share some powerful truths from the Word!

But the blessings didn’t stop there. After Jonathan preached, Pastor Solomon spoke a bit more, then did something that will stay with me for life. Let me preface this by saying how very poor this area, actually all of Kenya is. Driving through the countryside from Eldoret to Webuye, I was shocked by the sheer number of people everywhere you looked, crowds so thick you could not see where the side road was you were supposed to turn onto. Then the mud huts, mile after mile, tiny rooms where maybe 6 to 12 people will sleep together on the floor or on small mats, mostly without blankets. It really is not like anything I have seen in any movie or magazine or TV program – it is just amazing, a totally different life for these wonderful people.

So it was against that backdrop that Pastor Solomon called me up on stage and asked the privilege of sowing a seed for the ministry our team would be doing later in Kitale and Kisumu and Nairobi. He said that in obedience to the Great Commission, they wanted to be part of reaching the world for Jesus through what we would be doing. He then put a bucket on my lap and had any in the congregation who wanted to sow this seed to come up and put money in the bucket! One by one, these precious brothers and sisters who have nothing BUT Jesus gave from what little they had with the greatest joy. It was all I could do to not cry the whole time. Doesn’t that remind you just a bit of the group of believers that begged Paul for the privilege of sharing in the offering for the saints in Jerusalem even though they had so little? Andrea and Jonathan counted out what they gave later that evening and were absolutely stunned by the size of the offering! “Mom, you have no idea how huge this is!” were her exact words. I can tell you it was huge to me. And humbling beyond words. May their unshakeable trust in their Deliverer inspire you as it did me.