This is a bit overdue, but I feel the need to post it since it’s on my mind so often. These are the kinds of things that have become so ‘normal’ that I have the tendency to hold off on posting them.
Jessica Sims, Jennifer Miele and I were walking back to our hostel from downtown Nairobi, Kenya…
(hey, my favorite Christmas song (Baby, it’s cold outside) just popped on my ipod, maybe this is God telling me I’m on the right track by writing this finally haha)
It was a few days before Christmas so we were walking around in the Christmas spirit!! A man walking behind was whistling Joy to the World, so I couldn’t help but start whistling along with him (a trait passed on from my dad who is an avid whistler haha) The guy walked by and gave me a dirty look which was not what I was expecting from a man carrying such a friendly tune! That didn’t affect our mood though- we broke out singing Christmas carols smiling at everyone we passed by. One man in particular seemed to be enjoying our ridiculous singing and tried to keep pace with us, smiling over at us the whole time. J He then asked us where we were from and what we were doing in Nairobi. I explained the World Race, and all that good stuff. Turned out, he was a pastor in the neighborhood! He loved hearing us sing and invited us to sing for his church on Sunday! Haha There’s a few funny things about this…one being that we were not putting any effort into our singing, it was more of a ridiculous jokey just wanna have fun kinda singing! Yet he invited to sing in front of his whole church that Sunday after just meeting us…love it!
jen, jess and i singing oh, holy night 🙂
Anyway, we explained we would be leaving for Thailand before Sunday would arrive but thanked him so much for his offer. We exchanged contact information in hopes that his church could be a contact for a future World Race team in Nairobi and were back on our way to the hostel. What a great guy and great opportunity for future teams to partner with that the Lord brought us to…
But! This isn’t the end of the story!
So we kept walking back to our hostel, singing more cheerfully than ever! Luckily, people we passed by seemed to be enjoying our carols which reminded the girls and I of the line in Elf, “The best way to spread Christmas cheer is to sing loud for all to hear!” haha
About an hour later, one of the girls on our squad was getting baptized at a hotel down the road so we all headed over. As the baptism was getting started, the head honcho of security walks out and is trying to get us to pay and/or have us leave. The squad was on the other side of the pool starting things up as I tried talking it out with the guard. He didn’t seem too eager to budge so plan b was to stall things until they finished the baptism haha After a few minutes, the hotel manager came out and was in the same boat as the security guy. Little did I know, the Lord was working this whole time haha After a few more minutes of talking to them, they agreed to let us stay and finish the baptism without paying a dime. The hotel manager out of the blue mentioned that he hadn’t been to church in a while, so I began asking him more about why that was. He said he didn’t really have a good reason, he just stopped going and then didn’t really know many churches in the area.
How convenient! We happened to meet a pastor of a church right in the area about an hour ago on the street! Haha I brought out the pastor’s contact information and the church address and it happened to be right down the street from where he lives! What a ‘coincidence’, right?? 😉
I emailed the pastor and let him know we met a friend that may be coming to his church on Sunday, so keep an eye out for any new visitors.
I was telling this story to Aly (my amazing friend and squad leader J) and she brought up a great characteristic of God that many of us fail to think about…God is so playful. It’s like we’re his little kids and he’s telling us, ‘hey, look over there’, or ‘hey, go talk to that person’. It’s funny how we can go throughout our day and keep to ourselves and have everything go just fine..right on schedule. Or we can choose to let other peoples positive attitudes (or whistles in this case) infect us, and bring that joy to other people around us. We can choose to not let the negative attitudes (or dirty looks in this case haha) bring us down. God sets up divine appointments. As we walk in the spirit more each day, God will continue blessing that. We don’t have to do it on our own. He’ll help us out. He’ll whisper what He wants us to do, who he wants us to speak to, what he wants us to say. All we have to do is choose yes.
random picture from my travels….
