“Why are you so insistent that we join you for dinner tonight Sylvia? Why feed strangers?” I asked our eighteen-year old Kenyan hostess as I took a seat on the dirt floor of
her family’s tent.
her family’s tent.
“I never pass up an opportunity to serve Jesus a meal,” she answered with a smile. As she prepared our meal, she began to share her story. The portrait she painted contains no green pastures or still waters–only violence, death and devastation–yet she told it with full confidence in God’s goodness and faithfulness…
By tradition, violence follows Kenyan elections. The losers attack those that supported the winner, often burning their towns to the ground. Four years ago, Sylvia’s village experienced this, and she had to flee for her life. Some of her friends and neighbors escaped, but many of the children and elderly were chopped to death with machetes. Sylvia remembers watching four young boys seek shelter in a church. The enemy boarded up the doors and windows with them inside and then set it on fire. No one made it out.
Sylvia watched this. She experienced it.
Why then do she and her family wake up every morning
thankful and praising God?
thankful and praising God?
In the video below, I told her to preach to us. She was the most qualified one in the room to educate us about what our response should be in the face of destruction, to explain how we as sons and daughters should respond to the subject of destruction in our lives. “The floor is yours Sylvia. Tell us, because none of us knows…”
Thanks for sharing Sylvia’s story Clint, I needed to hear it.
ha… it’s so simple 🙂