Project Beauty

For this reason, I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you.

 2 Timothy 1:6a (NRSV)

The alarm sounded.  I quickly sat up, crawled out from underneath the mosquito net, stretched my arms to the ceiling, and boldly declared, "Today I start Project Beauty!" Ken chuckled as he turned over, but I leapt from my bed and marched out of the room with purpose.

We are in the dry season, which is perhaps the least attractive time of year in Kenya. Everything, and I mean everything, is covered in brown dust.  Plants are either dormant or dying, and every insect known to science has come out of the woodwork (yes, and I mean that literally) to search for moisture.  In fact, during Candidates Council this week, I found it difficult to concentrate on the agenda because of an ugly bug sitting in the middle of our boardroom table.  Incredibly, no one else seemed to notice until it started to move toward me.  At that point, another officer deftly swept the creature to the floor with his own papers.  Great, I thought.  Now it can crawl up my leg.

Home League ladies from Bungoma cleaning up the community market.

You could say that there's been a lot of ugliness in our lives over the past few weeks.  Ken came home and proudly announced he had found a "user friendly" rat trap at the market for our home.  He tried to show me how it worked, but I had absolutely no interest in the thing.

One of our accepted candidates recently failed to report to the Training College, and she's still missing.  Her parents, her fiance, and her corps family have no idea what happened to her. She has simply vanished.

In order to promote road safety, the authorities in Kakamega County have placed a wrecked vehicle on a high platform in the middle of town.  While I understand their good intentions, this has been a problem for me in two ways.  First, that particular car was the one in which one of our corps leaders was riding when it was struck by an out-of-control lorry.  He did not survive.  Second, since the car was placed on its pedestal, people have been stripping it for parts.  That doesn't help the message.

On top of all that, we have to deal with the usual amount of difficult news that reaches our offices every day.

The Lord has reminded me in my prayers this morning of a quote from Elsie de Wolfe, the woman credited with turning interior design into a profession:

I am going to make everything around me beautiful.  That will be my life.  

To that I say, "Amen!"  After all, when the Lord created the world, He started with chaos and had to bring order to it.  He took a shapeless mass and created a beautiful backdrop for our lives.  And then, He performed the same beautiful miracle in our hearts!

God painting the sky in Kenya

So it's clear to me that our God believes in beauty and in its power.  Beauty draws you in, and says all is well.  It comforts and it inspires.  And as children made in His image, shouldn't we create lovely things too?  We all do it differently, of course, because we have all been given different gifts.  But every single one of us can be a creator of beauty in one way or another.

So as I cleaned my home, gave myself a facial, and painted my nails yesterday as part of Project Beauty, I also took a moment to make a surprise tea for the guards on our compound.  I prepared a gift for a young mother in need, and I wrote a letter of encouragement.

Beautiful.  And powerful.

Praying or Pleading?

For you are great, and do wondrous things; You alone are God.

 Teach me YOUR way, O Lord; I will walk in YOUR truth.  Psalm 86:10-11 (NKJV)

I love watching my African sisters carry everything from fruit and vegetables to firewood on their heads. They do it with such beauty and grace.  Their example reminds me of the burdens I take up every morning when I leave my quarters.  Poverty, death, illiteracy, corruption, starvation, and witchcraft are just a few of the burdens that I must carry here. The load is heavy and uncomfortable, and while I certainly do my best, I'm not sure that I demonstrate half as much dignity and grace in the process.

A few weeks ago, the street boys of Kakamega asked to take the Hodder family on a tour of the town as they know it.  They wanted to show us how and where they live.  As we began our walk, two of the youngest took me by the hand, eager to protect me.  Another boy, who unfortunately is addicted to sniffing glue, kept his eye on the traffic.  Whenever we stopped at a busy intersection, he would grab my arm to make sure that Mama made it safely to the other side.  The boys took us to the trash dump where they scavenge for food, and then to the dilapidated mud huts where some of them sleep.

At one point, an older boy stopped me and bent down to tie my shoe.  As he did so, my heart broke when I noticed that not only was he shoeless himself, but his feet were covered in horrible sores.  Another reached out to steady me as I crossed a rickety wooden plank that had been laid over an open sewer, and then asked if we could go to the hut in which he lives.  We agreed, and once we arrived, Ken was asked to enter and bless the "home" with a prayer.   Dozens of other residents, who had all come out to greet the visitors, asked for a similar blessing.

In another hut, I saw through the darkness that the walls had been decorated with charts of the English alphabet, addition and subtraction, and the spelling of simple words.  That hut was fortunate to have parents in residence, and I was learned through our translator that their eldest boy had recently started attending our makeshift school at Territorial Headquarters.  Although uneducated themselves, the parents stood tall and proudly announced that their son would some day be a teacher.  After praying a blessing on their humble home, I quietly slipped out, hoping they did not see me wipe away a tear.  

The tour lasted for several hours, and I never stopped praying for miracles the entire time. Lord, I prayed, how can this happen?  I felt hopeless, discouraged, and even a bit angry. Why, Lord?  Why did you send me here?  Why have you given me these boys to love?   How can I sleep at night knowing they are hungry? 

Martha's Boys with the Hodders and Major Eleanor Haddick, our Social Services Secretary

Throughout the following week, I found myself begging God for resources to meet the demands of our ministry.  I  found myself pleading for Him to lighten my load.  

It was during one of my quiet times about two weeks later that the Lord finally spoke to me through a quote from Henry Blackaby's book, Experiencing God:

God invites you to become involved with Him in His work.

It occurred to me that, instead of constantly praying for God to do this or that based on my own vision and plans, I should try to put myself in tune with what He is already doing.  I should simply make myself available to do His work, according to His perfect plan.  When I stop to consider how these boys are slowly being transformed,  I can see that God is up to something big.  Really big.  And I want to be part of it.

First Things First

 "Feeling must follow, but faith, apart from all feeling, must be there first."
Martin Luther

I slipped out of the bed slowly, careful to avoid becoming tangled in the mosquito net. I gently wrapped myself in a wool blanket, tiptoed to the sitting room, and plugged in the tea pot.  As the water boiled I peaked out the window, eager to see the monkeys around our cottage.  Finally, with a steaming cup of tea in my hand, I slipped out on to the veranda, quietly pulled up a chair, curled up inside it, and waited patiently for the rest of the family to wake up on Christmas morning.

There is nothing like Christmas in the rain forest.  So as I sat there and listened to the birds sing and watched dew drops fall from the branches, I was overcome with emotion. "Thank you, Lord," I whispered, "for all your blessings on our family in this past year."

   

2014 has been a year of extreme highs and lows.  Our Territory has celebrated the opening of 45 new corps and several new districts and divisions.  We have seen thousands find Christ.  But we have also mourned the unnecessary loss of officers and soldiers to preventable diseases.  Family illnesses back home have caused us great concern, and corruption and terrorism have threatened to destroy peace in Kenya.  

There have also been some moments that I'll never forget.  I cringed when I recalled the day I discovered a slaughtered cow in an officer's bedroom.  She had wanted to surprise us with a special feast, and while I don't recall the meal, I certainly remember the surprise!  Then my heart began to melt with the memory of the day that the street boys of Kakamega, who literally have nothing to celebrate in life, defeated our Territorial Headquarters team in football and then ran around the pitch in triumph, holding aloft the simply trophy they had won.  It was memories like these that signaled the start of a great Christmas Day.

When it was all over and we started to pack away our little tree, I looked one more time at every ornament, each of which elicited an emotional reaction, some of them pleasant, and others more difficult.  As I sealed the box, I concluded that emotions are a precious gift from God, for without them our lives would be dull, empty and joyless.   But I was also reminded of the truth found in Proverbs 3:4-5: 

       Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.

Emotions, I thought, really can't be trusted, because they are based solely upon my perception and my understanding.  God is a lot bigger than that.  I then realized that it's the tree that matters.  Put a sparkling ornament on a dead, lifeless tree and it will lose its sparkle.  But place a less than attractive ornament on a beautiful tree, and it will take on new life and brilliance.  In the same way, I decided, it's my faith in God's promises that makes my life beautiful, rich, and satisfying.  Emotions are just the ornaments.

As I praise the Lord for all the lessons and blessings showered on me in 2014, I commit once again to place my faith in Him.  I will dance with joy when I feel like it, of course, and I will cry when circumstances dictate.  But even when I'm crying, I'll know that there are other dancing days yet to come.

May the Lord bless you and yours in 2015.

Deep Feelings

I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it.

  I want to have lived the width of it as well.  ~ Diane Ackerman

What an emotional week!  It started with news that a friend of mine was called home to Heaven.  You would think that I could get used to all of the funerals here, but with every passing comes deep sadness, even though we also rejoice at Heaven's gain.  I'll miss my friend very much.

The Army meets the community at the home of the bereaved for the burial service.

A few days later, we opened a school for "Martha's Boys" (which is our name for the boys from the streets of Kakamega) on our headquarters compound.  Some of the boys are runaways, but my heart really goes out to the orphans whose extended families will sometimes simply bring them to Kakamega and then abandon them.  We have made a hall available to the new school, of course, but the boys seem to prefer taking their classes under the big tree that is sandwiched between our garbage dump and the pit latrines.   I couldn't be more proud of these young men.

Distributing school supplies to Martha's Boys

On Friday, we held a press conference with the Governor of Kakamega County.  After Ken and I gave a short report on Martha's Boys and our work with a group of local prostitutes that we're calling the "Survivors," the Governor graciously pledged his support.  Taking him at his word, I brought two of the ladies into the room.  They spoke with him in Swahili for a few nervous minutes, and only later was I told that it was culturally unknown for a prostitute to converse with such a powerful man.  Still, it seemed to work, as the ladies then told me that they had something to tell the community.  I took them across the room to one of the cameramen, and they spoke excitedly for ten minutes about all the love and support they had found at The Salvation Army.  It was quite a moment.

After the conference, the Governor asked Ken to pray this Monday at the dedication of the new market in Kakamega, which is quite an honor.  Ken said yes, of course, but he was then told that he'd be praying at the opening of both the market and the new slaughterhouse.  Now that's one situation that we never covered in Training School!

By now, you'll have guessed that my emotions have run the gamut this week.  But in my devotions yesterday, I was reminded of the fact that I am not alone in this.  Various passages in the New Testament demonstrate that Jesus had the same experience.  He also felt affection, anguish, anger, compassion, distress, grief, gladness, indignation, joy, love, peace, and sadness.  In a way, that helps me to understand what He meant in John 10:10:

I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.

Jesus didn't mean by this that we would only experience love, joy and peace.  He knew that that our feelings would range far beyond that.  What He meant, I think, was that we would live in every sense of the word - that we would truly feel all the emotions that life has to offer.  He was saying that when we know God loves us and we then encounter the ups and downs of life, we don't just experience them, but we learn from them.  We grow spiritually.  We live the "abundant lives" that He promised.

So, yes, I am a bit emotional at times.  But praise the Lord for it!

Kingdom Planting

Let us thank the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. 

It was through His loving-kindness that we were born again to a new life

and have a hope that never dies. 

1 Peter 1:3a 

Because they bring disgrace upon a family and their community, it is still legal in Kenya to kill a baby born of incest.  One community is now debating whether a four-day old baby should be allowed to live, and in Kakamega, newborns that are the product of incest are either abandoned on the doorstep of a local children's home or just disappear.  They never have a chance.  It's all very sad.

Recently, I was called down from my office to meet two young boys who were being treated for chiggers by one of our officers.  Before I got there, I was warned that their toes had been eaten away, and so I tried to prepare myself for what I would see.  It wasn't enough.  All that was left of their feet was masses of damaged flesh.  But that wasn't the worst part.  The worst part was looking into their eyes.  The boys didn't speak.  They just stared back at me, expressionless.  They'd lost all hope.

After doing what we could to treat their wounds, we got the boys some shoes and trousers, and then we invited them to join "Martha's Boys," our new program for the street kids of Kakamega.  It's not much, and we run it on a shoestring.  But the boys keep coming.  Later, as I walked backed to our building, I prayed, "Lord, how can we treat all these young boys, and then just turn them back over to the streets?"  Blinking back the tears, I prayed for a miracle.  I prayed for a facility where we could care for them properly.

Ken and I recently visited Turkana, which is by far the most isolated command in our Territory.  We arrived at District Headquarters to the sight of over 100 students from the Army's school in Lokitaung, all of whom were smartly dressed in their school uniforms, waiting for a ride to the school.  I was told that, because the Army doesn't have its own vehicle, the school will hire buses to take them on the eight-hour journey.  You can image my surprise when a cattle truck pulled up a few minutes later and the students started climbing on.  They were going to stand shoulder to shoulder in the back of that truck for the entire journey, which would traverse some of the most brutal desert conditions in Kenya.  And they were looking forward to it.  One of the officers said to me, "The students are happy because they're the lucky ones.  They get to study."

Arriving for Worship at the Lokichoggio Corps 

Ken and his bodyguards (note the guns!) visiting the new Kasarani Outpost

Before we left Turkana, Ken and I were asked to plant trees to commemorate our visit.  "We have planted several trees here before," I thought, "and they always die."  But I went ahead anyway and did what I was asked, and it was then that the Lord reminded me of a quote:

  “Love is hope when reason despairs.” – Jack Hyles

We weren't planting trees, really.  We were planting hope.  When everything around us seems bleak, it is hope that keeps us going.  It's what convinces us that things will change and that miracles still happen.  So yes, I'll plant a seed of hope.  Because if I can do that much, God will take care of the rest.   

What a Thrill!

I came that they may have and enjoy life,
and have it in abundance (to the full, till it overflows). John 10:10 (AMP)

This month has had its ups and downs.  After weeks of eye pain and consulting two local doctors, my loving husband contacted the American Embassy for a medical referral. Based upon that information, Ken flew me to Nairobi to meet with a surgeon, and within two minutes, he determined that I had a small piece of hard plastic embedded in my eye.  I'd been suffering for more than two months, but he removed it in ten seconds. I don't mind saying that it took every ounce of self-discipline at my disposal to keep myself from dropping to my knees at the doctor's feet in gratitude.  

Power has been sporadic at best, at one point forcing me to shop at the market in the dark.  Not a good way to select meat, let me tell you.  And at home, our lights have been flickering on and off almost constantly. Add the loud music from a three-day wedding celebration in another compound across the valley, and it's been like living in a disco (not that I would know!)

Last weekend, I was the guest at a Home League Congress in the Tongaren Division at which more than 1,000 women were present.  Many ladies arrived at the school compound in which the event would take place carrying suitcases on their heads.  At the same time, a line of buses raised huge billows of dust as they lurched from side to side along the dirt road that led to the school.  As each one arrived, the ladies would pile out, carrying everything they needed for the weekend -- firewood, mattresses, cooking supplies, and chickens.  Wow.  As you might expect, it turned out to be an amazing three-day camping jamboree with, you guessed it, not-stop dancing. 

One corps leaving the Congress in their tractor.

It is circumcision season in Kenya.  So on my way home from the Congress, I saw several parades, which are understood here as celebrations of the fact that local boys are becoming men.  These ceremonies play an important role in the culture of western Kenya, but I confess that I do worry about boys who are essentially kidnapped, stripped, and then cut without their consent.  And my heart breaks for those families that will lose their child at the hand of an inexperienced cutter.

A circumcision celebration in Mbale

Put it all together, and you'll understand that this month has been a wild ride.  A Pinterest quote says it all:

Life is like a roller-coaster.  It has its up and downs. 

It's your choice to scream or throw up your hands and enjoy the ride!

Yes, there are days I want to scream.  But God has made a way for me to live a life of joy and victory.  So today, I'm going to sit back, throw up my hands, and enjoy the ride.

Change Me

Do not conform yourselves to the standards of this world, 

but let God transform you inwardly by a complete change of your mind. 

Romans 12:2a  (GNT)

Throwing her arms around me, a woman that I haven't seen in years exclaimed, "Mama, you look wonderful.  You haven't changed a bit!"  I was skeptical, of course, but since I turned 53 this week, that compliment was a lovely gift.  Maybe my extensive maintenance routine and all the lotions and potions I use every day really does make a difference.

Kakamega has recently experienced some violent storms.  Last week, the sound of hail pounding the metal roof on our quarters was so loud that Ken and I couldn't hear each other at the dinner table.  So we ate in silence until we looked up and saw water beginning to pour into the room. Unable to communicate in any other way, Ken and I waved our hands wildly and then scrambled to put out a collection of bowls, buckets, and towels.  Once they had been placed strategically around the room, we sat back down at the table, smiled at one another, and finished our dinner to the romantic sound of a waterfall.  

That's not how I would have reacted a few years ago.

The biggest news around town these days is that our local airstrip is now operational, with (almost) daily flights to Nairobi.  So since Ken and I had to visit the Nigeria High Commission, we booked a flight.  We arrived at the airstrip and sat down in the small departure lounge, patiently waiting for our flight to be called.  Ken and I watched as a small, single engine plane touched down on the tarmac (a bit too hard for my liking), and I suggested that it was just delivering the mail.  But then the attendant told us that our briefcases were too big to keep with us.  That's when I realized that this was OUR plane.  I swallowed hard, surrendered my bag, and received in return a small brown paper sack containing a dry sandwich and small bottle of water.  At that point, I determined that any questions about the entertainment system would be superfluous, and I slowly climbed up the few stairs into the back of the plane (Note to self:  next time, wear trousers).

It was at this juncture that I noticed the distinction between our airstrip and the plane.  The airstrip was new, and it looked great.  The plane, on the other hand, was relatively old, and most things seemed to be broken.  In fact, I thought I saw the words "Wright Brothers" on one of the wing struts.  The pilot turned around, welcomed us on board, and then we were off . . . on what was undoubtedly the bumpiest flight I have ever experienced.  In the course of the next hour, we flew through two rainstorms.  During the second, I squeezed my husband's hand so hard that it turned white, and I yelled into his ear, "Next time, we drive!"  Ken just smiled and patted my hand.

On the way back the following day, Ken did his best to distract me by pointing out the herds of zebra and giraffe that we flew over.  In fact, I actually started to enjoy the flight until our pilot made a turn that was a bit too steep, which caused the plane's early warning system, in a voice eerily reminiscent of our Garmin, to say, "Caution. Insufficient  power."  Gulp.  A few minutes later, as we crawled out of the plane in Kakamega, it took all of my self-discipline to refrain from kneeling down (in papal fashion) and kissing the ground.

Ken tells me that it will not be so bad when we fly to Nairobi again next week.  Right.

As we drove home from the airstrip, bumping along the dirt roads, maneuvering through herds of cows, and slowly passing through crowded markets, I thought again about how much my life has changed.  I'm in a different place, and I've learned a different way of thinking, of working, and of serving.  Yet I'm neither surprised nor concerned, because when you choose to follow Christ, doesn't it also mean you choose to be changed?  

The world focuses on the exterior, giving a great deal of attention to beauty, looks, and image.  But Christ works from the inside out.  He transforms our thoughts, allowing us to experience life as one grand adventure in faith.  And it is by living life for Him that we are changed.   Martin Buxbaum once wrote:

Some people, no matter how old they get, never lose their beauty.

They merely move it from their faces into their hearts. 

So as I grow older,  I pray that God will continue to change me, to transform me into His likeness. Perhaps on the day He calls me heavenward, He will throw his arms around me and whisper lovingly, "My, how you've changed."