The rain finally started coming down cats and dogs. It had been developing an increasingly dismal forecast on my bus ride home from town. The sky turned dark gray and the clouds started grumbling and flashing. The four new MSTs from Florida saw the dark clouds growing but decided they still wanted to go out for frozen yogurt. We’ll see how wet they are when they come home. Just a few minutes after they left the torrents began.
The rest of us are at home, warm and dry, though sadly the internet just went out. The power was out all day (of course…the day that I set aside to “get stuff done”) and oh how I rejoiced when power came back! Then the internet went out. At least the power is on and we can sit in the nicely lit living room and watch movies and ….just kidding…the last strike of lightning just took out the power too. We’ll see how long my computer battery lasts. I need to be careful what I write in my updates apparently.
Anyhow, I had a chocolate chip cookie milkshake at Java House today. It was my second this week. That’s what kind of a week I had (I usually only run to Java when I’m especially stressed and need a break from life). I’m reading my way through the Jungle Book right now and that also proved a wonderful escape. Stories of talking animals combined with the glory of a Java milkshake was just what I needed before returning to the chaos of daily life. I woke up today and knew I couldn’t survive the chapati cooking project. I needed a day to just be.
It’s been a hard week, to put it mildly. Actually it’s been one of the hardest weeks I’ve had in a very, very long time. I can’t go into so much detail but it’s sufficient to say that everything I have taught my team on Godly leadership was put to the test this week in full display of all just so I have the opportunity of living out all I’ve been teaching them the past year and a half. It also has tested their level of commitment to the ministry as well. Will you continue working for God and only for Him when the rest of the world is against you? You only find out when you are tested. God also has been thoroughly and completely humbling me, a lesson which never tastes good on the way down. The lesson of my own insignificance and need for God is a necessary lesson, but not an easy one.
God has been teaching me to rely on His word more as my only hope. He’s also been teaching me to dig more into Him. Necessary reminders. As good as milkshakes are, their goodness cannot come close to the sweetness brought on by meditating on the Word. When I finish the milkshake, it's all over with. With the Word, the more I drink of it, the more hope I have and the more strength to go on...and this is the kind of strength that far outlasts the time spent reading it. There is no substitute.
He answered a prayer of mine this week too. As usual, I need to be careful what I pray for cause too often God answers my prayers and I am not sure how many of my prayer requests I’ve really thought through the consequences of before I pray them. For awhile I had been struggling with the fact that coming home in September meant leaving Kenya and the work here with EAC. It’s been something that really was difficult for me and I prayed that God would help me feel ready to leave when the time came. This week answered that prayer, though in a much more difficult way than I could have anticipated. Now I am more than ready to come home. I can leave now. In all the years I have worked in Africa, I have never once said that I was ready to come home. I have never counted the days to departure before. That is why I had two milkshakes this week; two milkshakes, a sleepless night, a few long walks, quite a few tears and a whole lot of journaling.
I will finish this race. God has called me here and I will finish my term. I am here for Him and Him only. He is my reward and that is more than enough. I have been tested and my prayer is that at the end of the day I will hear those sweet, sweet words: “well done, good and faithful servant.” Those are the words I long for more than any other.
I turned 26 a few weeks ago. Athena, dear one, took me out for Ethiopian food to celebrate. When I returned home, the whole team was there just waiting for their chance to get revenge on me for all the surprise parties and drenchings they have received on their birthdays. I knew it was coming and was thoroughly soaked from head to toe when they were done. They made a cake too and decorated the living room with lots of love signs. I appreciated. I am blessed with wonderful friends in our co-workers.
The rain is continuing, but it might be a little lighter now, even though the living room is getting darker. The girls are discussing thunder storms at home. Beth is from Saskatchewan and Athena is from Florida so they have their fair share of lightning and thunder at home. At least our little garden behind our house is getting watered nicely. I weeded it today. I’m a very miserable gardener but I was inspired to trim the tomatoes, weed the sukuma wiki and slash the grass down. Athena planted an onion and a potato a few weeks ago as an “experiment” so that we could all find out what would happen. The onion is starting to grow but we don’t really know what will happen or what it will become. Even Martin, our resident farmer, didn’t know what the onion would grow into. Do onions make onion flowers? We want to find out.
“Thank you for rinsing my clothes again, God,” Athena says while staring out the backdoor. She spent a few hours washing her clothes today. They are carefully strung out on the clothesline in the back over the vegetable garden. She’s an eternal optimist and I really appreciate that.
I walked to the monkey trees quite a few times this week on my brain-clearing walks. There is an area near our house that I will purposefully go out of my way to go just so I can watch the troop of monkeys that live in the trees there. A whole troop of vervet monkeys go there to eat the fruit that grows on the trees. They are great, big, ancient looking trees and the intelligent monkey faces and their nimble movements really make me happy. Some day Athena and I want to bring stools and sit under the trees and just watch the monkeys. We saw a different type of monkeys in the forest behind us a few weeks ago. They were very fuzzy monkeys and also very cute. At home I watch squirrels, here I watch monkeys. The little yellow weaver birds make me happy too. Their complex little houses and cute squeaks they make just make me smile whenever I see them, which thankfully is a lot. Sometimes I think God made monkeys and weaver birds just to cheer me up on hard days and give me something to praise Him for.
I think my cooking buddy will be a bit late in helping cook today (and she’ll also probably be more than a bit late). I felt a little guilty today when I bought a chicken from the butcher shop and then passed a very protective mother hen and her flock of little tiny chicks peeping around her. It will make a good dinner though so I stopped feeling guilty. I will go start cooking the chicken and spaghetti by lantern light while Athena and Beth are calculating how much bread each person eats per day. I don’t know why they are calculating this but for some reason they have decided it’s important. They are calling it their “experiment”. More likely it’s entertainment when the power has gone off and their computers have died. Maybe the rain will stop, maybe it won’t. Maybe the power will come back, maybe it won’t. Regardless, God is still good and will be good and has been good and so there is always hope for tomorrow.
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