Last night our team rode a bus from Bungoma to Nairobi (a nine hour drive). We left at 8pm, and arrived at our hostel around 5 o’clock this morning. With the extreme heat and cold, potholes and reocurring speedbumps, sleeping on a moving bus in Africa is definitely a….”memorable” experience. Kenya is hot during the day, and very cool at night. Around midnight I wrapped myself in a blanket that I stole from one of the airlines in Ethiopia (missionaries are sinners, too!) in an attempt to keep warm. Taking advantage of the vacant seat beside me, I laid down and curled up in a ball. As I laid there, shivering, I was reminded of something back home:
In my house, we have two fireplaces. One is a wood-burning stove (closed), and the other is a “normal” fireplace–each in opposite ends of our home. My bedroom has a wooden floor, and gets quite cold in the winter. Michigan winters are rough, and on most nights, the cold air in my room drove me out to the couch–my favorite place in the entire house. In my living room our couch faces the wood-burning stove. Next to the stove is our sliding glass door. In the winter, when you lay on the couch and look through the sliding glass door, you see the back porch, and the snow-covered woods beyond it. The shadow of the flames dance on the rug as the warm glow of the fire dimly lights the room. It’s the best sleep you’ll ever get, I promise you.
Having a wood-burning stove in our house has been great, but it has its downfalls, too. In order to stay warm, someone has to keep the fire going. At the rate we burn wood, the stove needs to be refilled every four or five hours. Growing up, our family went to bed around 10pm. This means that wood went into the stove at 10pm…this also means that if we wanted to stay warm through the night, the stove needed to be refilled again around 3am.
When I was on the bus, trying to find a comfortable position to keep warm in, I was reminded of a noise I often heard back home. It was the sound of the squeeky handle opening on our wood-burning stove. My dad kept the fire going in our house. He filled the stove during the day, when he got home from work. He filled it again just before bed. He woke up every morning around 3 am to fill it, and again at 6am, before leaving for work. No one asked him to do it…he just…did it. Faithfully. Every time. I never questioned whether or not he was going to get up in the middle of the night so that I would stay warm. I knew he’d wake up. He always did. It’s just what he did. Because he loves us.
Dad would shift the stick on the bottom of the stove, and then turn the handle to open the door a crack. Next he’d open the sliding glass door and step out onto our snow-covered porch to grab a few pieces of wood to throw in the stove. I usually kept my eyes closed during all of this, even though it woke me up. As soon as the sliding glass door opened, a burst of icy air would sweep through the room, reminding me of the chill that my dad was protecting me and my family from. I was grateful–even if I never voiced it.
Dad
: thank you for keeping the fire burning.
