Community

Its been a great week with the team from Providence church in Pennsylvania staying on the TI compound. They were working with the Neema and Shimo girls, and helping with the construction of the new classrooms which they had done the fund raising for. Thanks to the extra help that came from the team all the windows have been set and the walls are almost up to the ring beam. The lumber for the trusses is now on site and they will start to be made soon.

Its unbelievable how close the relationships with people can become in such a short time when living in a close community. Sharing devotions in the morning, experiences of the day in the evening and all the laughs while breaking bread together. I see this type of community working as the body of Christ, so much more then the institutional church that we are all familiar with, the ones that are attended once a week for about an hour. I think that the when the early church developed it would have interacted in a similar manner, which we see when reading Acts. In a discussion today it was mentioned that there could be a much larger link between the relationship that we have with one-another and the relationship that we have with God then we usually give thought to. Jesus taught that we should love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.

Honestly I'm a person that enjoys being alone in quiet, or just in small groups, but am learning that in a proper community the size of the group to some extent doesn't seem to matter. Its amazing that after just a short amount of time together with this larger group that the goodbye was still like having a part of the body being ripped from the flesh. This is something that I had experienced last year while here and there were teams that came and left every other week. Although it was made a little easier knowing that there was a new team that would be substituted for the one that was leaving.

Today the PA team headed back to Nairobi, and after an overnight there and a short safari tomorrow they will be flying back Stateside. There they will face the the struggle of being away from the community that had become more like home then home in some ways. Another challenge that they might be faced with when arriving back in the states is reverse culture shock. Something I have struggled with for years and am not sure that I will ever be able to wrap my head around, is how it is possible for people that are just barely surviving with minimal subsistence are still able to be so full of joy and happiness, while people who have been given everything they wanted from the time they were children so miserable and depressed? Sometimes I feel as Americans we can become so caught up in trying to achieve the so called American dream that we become enslaved to our possessions, status and things we think we are entitled to that we lose site of whats actually important. I know that this was something that I had struggled with for most of my life and in some cases still do.