You're kinda like me...

 

Happy First Official Post of 2023!!!!

Today I was pondering on some of the things that I learned while in Kenya; I could do post upon post about all the moments we shared while there, but I'll try to keep it to a minimum. But here is one that I thought that I'd share with you.

As the global missions intern, I had the honor and privilege of being in the planning meetings for this trip leading up to our going. I got to meet some of the team from OneHope that we'd be partnering with, along with the team from Kenya that would be hosting us. There was one particular meeting where my intern lead Brent, he's the bomb, asked the question "what are some of the challenges that we're going to face? Or rather, what are some of the things that we can bring as a team to a country like this?"

The pastor that we were talking to replied saying, "help our people understand that your God and our God are the same. The God of America is also the God of Kenya." Wow, this sentence hit me like a ton of bricks. Immediately I began questioning, how do I help these people know that my God and their God are the same when their kids are going to bed hungry every night? When they live in houses made of scraps? When some of them don't even have clean water to drink?

While there, I found that this task wasn't nearly as daunting as I thought it would be. I guess that I thought that I would have the have so many of the answers, or say things a certain way to help everyone understand the God that I serve. But that couldn't have been further from the truth...

There was one day that we had the privilege of going to an all girl's school and getting to know the students and staff there. Upon pulling up to the gate, we had about an hour or two to kill until we had the service that we were preparing for, so the staff told our group, "just go in pairs to a classroom and talk to the girls." They gave us free rein to just walk into the classroom and talk about whatever we wanted; yeah, they must have trusted us a lot. Then all 20ish of us college students from America, in pairs, walked into a classroom to a giggly group of teenage girls from Kenya. 

My friend Thomas and I had girls who were around fourteen to sixteen; they started out quiet, and then we started to ask them to write down questions for us to answer. We got questions about anxiety, we got questions about relationships (we were asked a few times if we were a couple, of course, that's going to happen around high school girls! They're the best), and we got questions about our faith. We got some harder and more honest questions about how to deal with depression, how to trust God even if you're scared, or how to know if God is real.

In the following minutes, we just got to love on these girls, sharing the little bit of wisdom that we could. But before we left, the one thing that I wanted them to know was that they're SO LOVED. 

I think that sometimes when going into a new environment, especially a new country, we assume that the people we meet will be really different from us. And while that is sometimes true, the more I travel, the more I find we are so incredibly similar. We are all human; we all struggle with understanding God and getting to know ourselves. We all have insecurities and fears, and we all need people to love and meet us where we're at. 

When it comes down to it there isn't some magical formula to getting to know people, it all comes down to helping others see that they're loved by God. That they're created in His image. And that they have a purpose. 

Love you guys, Savannah :)