O w e n s t o A f r i c a

washed in grace

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Serving With

Africa Inland Mission
Epic Church
Excel Church
First Missionary Church of Berne
Kapaa Missionary
Lihue Missionary
Muncie First Church of the Nazarene
Old Stone Presbyterian

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PO Box 80
Kijabe, Kenya
00220

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These are the mornings we rise to a world on fire. Some blazes are heartbreakingly literal: New South Wales, Victoria, the Amazon. In others our dignity as humans is burning to the ground.⁣ ⁣ Since leaving the States seven years ago I sometimes feel like a teacher who stepped out to the bathroom, only to return to a class steeped in anarchy.⁣ ⁣ “What happened?” I’ll ask our friends back home. “I left y’all unsupervised for a hot second, and look. It’s all Lord of the Flies in here.”⁣ ⁣ But yesterday a student from our bible college shared about visiting a church in the valley. It’s so remote, she said, there are no roads. No schools, no medical clinics, no water. The Turkana people who live there don’t have houses — “And yet,” she said, “they built a house for God.”⁣ ⁣ She reported that the people received the gifts our church brought, Christmas packages of cooking staples, and immediately pulled open the flour to roll and fry chapatis.⁣ ⁣ “Don’t you want to save this for Christmas?” our people asked.⁣ ⁣ “We will get more,” they said. “Right now let us cook for you.”⁣ ⁣ 😭⁣ ⁣ Just when I think I might suffocate on my disbelief and cynicism, a neighbor drenches us in cold, sweet mercy, and I remember.⁣ ⁣ I remember that we can be kind. I remember that we can be healers and growers and peace brokers, stunningly generous with our flour and our hope. I remember that the very breath of God is in us.

It’s somehow 2020 and the only real thing I did last year was learn to wait quietly with people in pain. Still, it was a gorgeous year. I love how my kids and my dorm kids were funny and brilliant just by showing up. I love how a dark river of wind rushes through this place from twilight to sunrise. I love the baby monkeys wrestling like furry tumbleweeds in our yard. Part of me hopes this next year will be kinder, easier, remarkably better behaved. Most of me knows, though, we live in a broken world and there are things worth fighting for. So okay. 2020 it is. May God be lifted high.

Merry Christmas from Kenya! He has come for us. ♥️

(When you live in Kenya but want to make a snowman, so your mom recruits the frost growing in the freezer)

I started the day with a walk just past six, too late for the blush and bruise of sunrise. But the sky hung with sickle-leafed eucalyptus and fir and fig, all of them exhaling oxygen and worship.⁣ ⁣ I miss our boys today. I miss our families and our soul-friends, but I also know I am possibly the luckiest.⁣ ⁣ Yesterday we drove into the scrub and thorn of the valley. We got lost, which never stops being funny.⁣ ⁣ We spent a good chunk of the day with some of our KKC kids and their smallish siblings. They played jumping games, and some of the little ones cried, and at one point a young man of six or seven stomped on a lizard. I had to swallow a lump of sadness.⁣ ⁣ Because it turns out I’m in love with sand-colored lizards. I’m in love with sunrises and our students and dorm boys. I’m in love with small children who chatter with their mouths full, and this life that I’ll never deserve.⁣ ⁣ #anthemofgrace

Sometimes I do this backward scuttle into solitude, a vestigial instinct that tips toward survival.⁣ ⁣ By most counts, I’m the problem. I’m hypersensitive, pathos lining my veins, and this world can feel like an assault on the heart.⁣ ⁣ I often marvel at how this is happening on our watch, this sideshow of human rights horrors. How can the poorest people on Earth bleed out on soil flush with gold and raw diamonds?⁣ ⁣ On Christmas day in Zemio, we did the Zande thing with the oranges. You pare off the rind and slice open the top, engineering a natural juice box. Then you slowly crush the orange into a velvet orb of pith and pulp, sucking out sun-colored juice as you go.⁣ ⁣ CAR is where I learned to love oranges and peace.⁣ ⁣ Maybe one day they’ll return. Maybe not tomorrow or next week or next year, but perhaps the Zande and Mbororo’s children, or their children’s children will return to Zemio. Maybe they’ll walk back in under clouds of mango and orange trees, palm nuts speckling the ground like rubies.⁣ ⁣ I have to think that the landscape of heaven might resemble a scene out of Central Africa: soil glittering bronze and gold, jeweled fruit trees, a sky so rich it breaks your heart.⁣ ⁣ ‘O come, desire of nations, bind / In one the hearts of all mankind / Bid Thou our sad divisions cease / And be Thyself our King of peace.’⁣ ⁣ I’m not doing Christmas music yet, but I am doing peace music.

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