Sustainable
Months ago, as I prepared for the Race I recall hoping to do something or leave something sustainable during my team’s 3 months in Africa. Specifically, a well came to mind. But not just any well, with bricks and mortar. I had a visual of a mural wrapped around it with verses in a tribal language.
But, being on an all women’s team, we do not tend to be assigned to contacts that need physical labor. Which, in all honesty, tends to frustrate me. While I am an idea person who thinks more on the intangible and conceptual plane, I also enjoy physically creating or building, in such a case as this theoretical well I dreamt up.
However, God is showing me that I do not need to physically create a well (or anything for that matter) to leave something sustainable. As we have found ourselves back in Kenya (but this time on the border and not on the west coast)¸on the onset, it appears that our main ministry focus is on the girls here. After our second day of ministry, in which we visited an elementary school, I found myself where I ought to be more often: humbled. I had followed a third grade teacher, Dara, into her classroom where they proudly sang songs to me before reciting a poem about AIDS. I was saddened, but mostly humbled by these young children’s knowledge of this deadly disease, because at their age, I was learning how to multiply, now how to prevent AIDS.
God has opened my eyes to more than I could have imagined or planned as I hoped to create something physically sustainable here in Kenya. He has humbled me and has shown me that my words of instruction and encouragement to these young ones has a spiritual, psychological, and emotional sustainability in its own right and that the theoretical well I had hoped for is nothing in comparison to the ‘eternal well’ (as Lauren referred to it later in the day) that we are creating by loving these children with the love of Christ.
